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THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


THE BELIEFS OF 
UNBELIEF 


STUDIES IN THE ALTERNATIVES TO FAITH 


BY 
Nils Delt A PLOg SU ShIRG ES spe bi RID yy 


AUTHOR OF 
“HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE,” ‘‘ THE UNREALIZED LOGIC OF RELIGION,” 
““ WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY,” ETC. 


NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 


Copyright, 1907, by 
EATON & MAINS, 


CONTENTS 


BOCK @iaAGOD 
PARTile CHB CHRISEIANSBATIUE 


CHAPTER PAGE 
Py 0071 | Ne NEW UDNDELICL ca «se aie selsice wuviers Oey wonts 6 wsisielsis I 
feeeGod inwoe Christian Creed awit nies oe hes Ape h em vi We 
IL The Evidences for Faith in God’... ..c. 6... ese e os ae 


PART II]. THE ALTERNATIVE TO BELIEF IN GOD 


ae EVO TS TY) ee erie Che ee hale crete, ol bap are ete eke e ersr ater ekeut eran 45 
mee Hest thics:OL ALHECIST 152 ois caten sas ole bree a tee ereheis 59 
III. Agnosticism... ...... eee eee eee ee cette eee eneeees ght 
IV. The Case Against Agnosticism ay tkeiat savas oN ura nent ead 85 
V. The Paradox of Agnosticism.........-2.++-+-00+s 106 


BOOK II. THE ALTERNATIVES TO BELIEF 
INS CHRISTE 


DART Ie THE CHRISTIANAFAITH ABOUT. CHRISE 


I. The Place of Christ in the Christian Creed........ 119 
II. The First Argument for Christian Faith: A Di- _ 
APETV CH ATACLEI ey i Cera ato tet le re aie ates er ciosein eaens 136 
III. The Second Argument for Christian Faith: A Di- 
WITLG MELISLOLY ale aisle dele ovo» Sele els Kee iti sieialde.s sole 154 


PART II. THE ALTERNATIVES TO FAITH IN 


CHRIST 
I. The Theory that Christ Never Existed............ 181 
II. The Theory that Christ Was an Impostor......... 192 
Ill. The Theory that Christ is Only a Myth........... 109 
TUERC OULTASCEC CO LCCUS eae uc teleititcle wrote ieee wate ete ain aioe 214 


al CONTENTS 


BOOK III. THE BIBLE 
PARTI. THECHRISTIAN FAITH ABOUT THE BIBLE 


CHAPTER PAGE 
i” Phe Puzzle of the Bibles ieee ha ees win ev eee 223 
II. The Logic of the Bible........... css eee eeececeees 240 
lll. “The Difficulties of the Bible. ...00.5.. 50. wsemee ee eee 258 


PARTII. THE ALTERNATIVES TO CHRISTIAN 
FAITH ABOUT THE BIBLE 


I. Is the Bible a Forgery?.......ccccccecsectevsswsar 267 
II. Is the Bible Only One of the Sacred Books of the 

RACER irs occ cic ce a Bis waey sede deb eitntes eer ae ee 273 

III. Is the Bible.a Book of Dreams?....0..00.e27sssmee 280 


FPO LUE. ce vic ens ensues cae acsaueet ob sss sus a6 th eae 288 


PROEM 


Tue NEw UNBELIEF 


How many things hard to credit one must believe in order 
not to be a Christian—-NEwMAN SmytuH, Reality of Faith, 
p. 40. 


The world sees today an unbelief of a new 
type: vague, loitering, evasive, and strangely 
contented. Doubt of the sterner sort, doubt 
which “goes sounding on its dim and perilous 
way, doubt which is an anguish, and which is 
much nearer faith than it knows, is much less 
common than formerly. In its stead has come 
an unbelief which is as indefinite as a mist, as 
obscuring, and as little shaken by storms. It is 
not a landscape, but a vapor. “Christianity,” 
it whispers, “is, if not untrue, at least unneces- 
sary: life can be lived well enough without it.” 
It is a mood untouched by any disquieting sense 
of ethical responsibility. It seems to itself to 
dwell in a realm in which the challenge of that 
“stern lawgiver” duty does not run. Unbelief, 
for these easy souls, is a sort of lotus-eater’s 


7 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


paradise. Its spirit is expressed in Tennyson's 
lines: 

There is no joy but calm! 

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things? 


>. Ls there any peace 
In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 


The new unbelief, in brief, does not deny; it 
does not affirm. It would describe its own mood 
as a state of mental equipoise, equally remote 
from both affirmation and denial. “If he does 
not accept the Christian faith,’ a doubter of 
this school would say, “neither does he reject 
it.’ His mood toward religion is that of a 
judge not yet satisfied with the evidence. He 
is weighing the arguments on both sides, and 
doing it with dispassionate leisureliness. No 
argument as yet has emerged which closes the 
case, and he waits for its appearance with easy 
content. 

This seems to its proprietor a dignified atti- 
tude, and one which even has about it a grati- 
fying halo of intellectual distinction, In addi- 
tion, it is, or. seems to be, delightfully free from 
any uncomfortable moral responsibilities. It is 
surely possible to argue that the obligations of 


THE New UNBELIEF 3 


a creed do not begin until the creed itself has 
been finally proved. So the doubter regards 
his conscience as uncommitted to either side. 
It is not responsible for any decision, for it has 
come to none. The soul stands, or rather 
sits, in a state of contented equipoise, betwixt 
mighty opposites. 

But, in mechanics and in morals alike, a state 
of equipoise means a point of exact balance be- 
twixt opposing forces; and to justify the al- 
leged equipoise of doubt, not only the forces 
for faith and against it, but for doubt and 
against it, must be ascertained and assessed. 
And it is certain that in the case of most doubt- 
ers of the type here described no process of this 
sort has been undertaken with sufficient seri- 
ousness. The difficulties of religion are exam- 
ined under a microscope, but the owner of the 
microscope does not apply it to his doubts or to 
the difficulties of his doubts. That they have 
their own difficulties, indeed, is, somehow, re- 
garded as a matter of quite secondary conse- 
quence. 

But in religion, and as an attitude toward 


4 Tue Beviers oF UNBELIEF 


the great affirmations of religion, doubt is re- 
mote by measureless degrees from that com- 
fortable, noncommittal attitude usually claimed 
for it. The human soul cannot sit, perched on 
a note of interrogation, amid the tremendous 
opposites of belief and unbelief, consenting to 
neither. Unbelief is itself a choice. It is an 
act, an affirmation, a creed, with the subtle, 
reflex influences on life which belong to a 
creed. 

We live under conditions which make any 
imaginary state of suspended decision impos- 
sible. Life runs swiftly and in the imperative — 
mood. Conduct can know no pause. The con- 
science refuses to dwell in a vacuum. Each 
instant, whether we choose it or not, we must 
act. 

Doubt seems to its possessor to suspend—or 
at least to postpone—the authority of divine 
law. But that very suspension of law becomes 
itself a rule of conduct, with all the responsi- 
bilities of law. 

Time, in a word, is intolerant of hesitations. 
Life has to be lived. The swift, unresting mo- 


THE New UNBELIEF 5 


ments throng past us, each one, in turn, a 
complete probation; each one bringing with it 
a challenge that pierces to the conscience and 
judges it. At every instant the stern challenge 
of duty has to be met and answered. The ship, 
to vary the figure, is on the wide and restless 
sea, with its mysterious tides, and brooding 
tempests, and far-off harbors. Sail we must! 
Some course must be chosen: some hand must 
be on the wheel—7s on the wheel. 

Let us imagine a captain laying side by side 
the conflicting charts of Faith and Doubt. He 
is undecided betwixt the two. He accepts 
neither. But that refusal to choose is itself a 
choice. To let the ship drift is a choice. The 
absence of a course is a course! 

Doubt, it is somehow taken for granted, 
means only the refusal to decide. It is not an 
act, but the arrest of actions. But in religion 
that arrest of action is itself an act of the high- 
est significance. It stops the train! It cancels 
out the most tremendous factors in the arith- 
metic of life. It thrusts aside, as though they 
were nonexistent, measureless obligations. It 


6 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


forbids the hand of Christ to touch the con- 
science. It puts God himself in the category 
of forces it is safe to neglect. What decision 
could be more tremendous in scale than that 
“refusal to decide,” which decides so much! 

Is it true that religion has no authority to 
affect conduct until it has been proved with the 
certainty of one of the axioms of Euclid? Till 
the last difficulty in religion is solved, and the 
last mystery is dissipated, have we the right to 
treat it as nonexistent? In what other realm 
of life do we treat doubt as a discharge from 
the obligation to act, or wait until the final un- 
certainty has vanished, before we move? We 
buy and sell, we risk money, and health, and 
happiness, and life itself on what are not cer- 
tainties but probabilities. We do this every 
day. The whole business of the world would 
be arrested if this were not the case. 

And this law of action runs into the ethical 
realm. Duty there, as everywhere else, begins 
long before an unclouded certainty is reached. 
The fool of the psalmist whispered in his heart: 
“There is no God.” The easy-tempered doubt- 


THE NEw UNBELIEF 7 


er of today does not go as far. He affirms 
nothing—even in a whisper! “There may be 
a God,” is his position, “but the proof is not 
sufficient to make his claim absolute.” 

Now, at the point of practice, and if he treats 
his doubt as a discharge from all necessity for 
practice, it is clear that such a doubter stands 
beside David’s fool without his excuse. Ifa 
man has ascertained finally that there is no 
God, he may act on that certainty. But not to 
be sure, only to doubt, and yet to act as though 
doubt were a certainty, and canceled all duty, 
is to out-fool the fool of the psalmist. 

It is easy to show, in this way, that the very 
make of the world, the insistent, unceasing 
challenge of events, the mere rush of the swift 
moments, make any easy, uncommitted equi- 
poise in the realm of religion impossible. But 
the doubter tricks himself when he imagines 
that his doubt represents any such equipoise. 

Doubt is itself a complete interpretation of 
life and the universe. That it is an interpre- 
tation which empties life of meaning, makes 
duty a guess, dismisses God from his own uni- 


8 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


verse, as an unproved hypothesis, and turns the 
characters of the moral law into fluctuating 
ciphers, capable of being read in a hundred 
ways, need not be considered just now. The 
point to be insisted on is that doubt is in 
itself a creed, with its own conscious or uncon- 
scious affirmations; it is to be judged, like 
every other creed, by its affirmations. : 

The notion that doubt has no positives, and 
is committed to nothing, is almost universal. 
Its literature is one long, loud oratorio of mere 
denials. It seems to have no theology of its 
own for which it is responsible. 

But, it must be repeated, our doubts are 
creeds! Creeds only half seen by their owners, 
perhaps, because they are not steadily looked 
at. But they are definite though unformulated 
creeds in spite of that. Every denial is one 
facet of a proposition of which the other facet 
is an affirmation. 

Take the foundation belief of all religion— 
the doctrine of God. In substance, there are, 
in relation to it, three schemes of thought pos- 
sible—theism, atheism, pantheism. Is a defi- 


THE New UNBELIEF 9 


nite choice betwixt these three inevitable? Is 
an uncommitted attitude betwixt them impossi- 
ble? No—a theory which denies—or at least 
cancels out—all three is thinkable. Huxley has 
invented a name for it; Herbert Spencer has 
drawn it out into a stately philosophical sys- 
tem. It is agnosticism. 

But agnosticism is itself, in turn, a creed, 
and one of the most positive and practical 
quality. Who denies that twice two makes 
four, need not affirm that they make three, or 
five. He may assert they yield a result un- 
known. But the formula, 2 + 2=, is a prop- 
osition as definite, and one which carries with 
it as directly practical results, as the proposi- 
tHomenati2 2.4) 

The only difference is that he who keeps his 
accounts, and carries on his business, on the 
theory that 2 + 2 = 4s, will discover that this 
is an arithmetic which—equally with the for- 
mula, 2 + 2 = 3 or = 5—leads straight to the 
insolvency court. 

Every possible alternative to Christianity, to 
sum up, is itself a belief; and being a belief it 


10 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


has its own special and inevitable ethics. It 
‘has for conduct the office which the axioms at 
the beginning of a geometrical problem have 
for the conclusion at its end. Conduct is the 
conclusion for which a man’s creed is the 
premise. ‘Our chief business with Christian- 
ity,” says Chalmers, “is to proceed upon it.” 
That is true of every creed. On what else 
should a man “proceed” ? 

Ethics are not to be chosen, like toys, be- 
cause they are pretty; or, like tools, because 
they are useful. They are conclusions from 
accepted postulates, and are as inevitable as the 
conclusions of geometry. Does anyone ima- 
gine that the conclusions of the problems in 
Euclid are movable, that they can be attached 
to any set of deductions at pleasure? 

The spectrum analysis, as everyone knows, 
makes visible, by a law woven into the very 
structure of things, the elements present in a 
ray of light. No matter how remote is the 
source of the light—it may come from Arc- 
turus or Orion—but under the test of the spec- 
troscope the elements in it register themselves 


Tue New UNBELIEF TI 


in certain fixed lines, as characteristic as a 
human signature. Does anyone suppose that 
the scientist can fit, at pleasure, to any par- 
ticular ray of light, any scheme of lines he 
wishes? The lines in the spectrum are the re- 
flex of the elements in the ray. They are not 
accidents; they are results. And because they 
are results they are a revelation. 

And life is the spectrum of the creed behind 
it. Exactly as the lines made visible by the 
spectroscope are the register of the elements in 
the ray, so the ethics of a creed follow, by a 
law from which there is no escape, from the 
structure of the creed itself. 

Each creed, it must be repeated, yields laws 
for conduct; and it is accredited or discredited, 
in advance, by the standard of life which it 
creates. And nothing is more certain than that 
all the rivals of Christianity are afraid of their 
own ethics. They disown them; they refuse 
to so much as remember them! ‘They try to 
steal the ethics of Christianity—its emotions, 
its motives, its vocabulary, its hopes. What 
spectacle is more familiar than aabenis eye anater el 


12 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


struggling to keep the moral system of Chris- 
tianity, and even its sun-filled horizon, while 
denying both its history and its doctrines? 

And for a time they succeed. That the 
denial of Christianity does not shape conduct 
instantly, and in every case, to its own strange 
and dreadful pattern, is due to the fact that 
the very unbelief which rejects Christianity 
cannot escape its influence. Something of the 
perfume of Christianity is in the very air of 
the world. The wholesome salt of its ethics is 
in the blood of the race. The man of no faith 
is still the child of whole centuries of faith. 

The choice of the soul, to sum up, does not 
lie, in the last analysis, betwixt Belief and 
Doubt; but betwixt rival forms of belief, If 
the Christian creed is not accepted, there 
emerge certain alternative beliefs perfectly 
definite in character, one or other of which 
must take its place. For the temple of the 
human soul cannot be left empty, swept, and 
garnished. Some Tenant must come! Men 
are unwilling to see the inevitable and under- 
lying affirmations of doubt; the dark alterna- 


THE NEw UNBELIEF 13 


tives to faith, from which there is no escape; 
they try, as we have said, to keep the Christian 
solution of the great problems of duty, while 
rejecting the axioms on which that solution is 
built. But no attempt is more certainly pre- 
doomed to defeat. 

These papers are an attempt to define and 
assess what may be called the positives of 
doubt; the strange beliefs which lurk under 
the mask of unbelief. Faith suffers—and 
rightly suffers—incessant challenge for its 
credentials. But let us stop for a moment to 
consider what are the credentials of doubt. 
The fight has hitherto raged round the evi- 
dences of religion; it is surely time to ask what 
are the “evidences” of irreligion. The Chris- 
tian faith has its difficulties, it may be frankly 
admitted ; but let the question be seriously con- 
sidered: What are the difficulties of the alter- 
natives to that faith? 

No fair-minded disputant, of course, will 
wish to push what may be called the logic of 
the dilemma too far; and no one with any ade- 
quate view of either truth or history will deny 


14. THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


that the alternative doctrines of today may 
prove, with ampler knowledge, to be the com- 
plementary truths of tomorrow. But this ap- 
plies only to truths of what may be called the 
secondary order. Some truths are absolute; 
some denials are final. It is idle to blind our- 
selves to these; it is cruel not to deal honestly 
with them. 

The positives of unbelief, in a word, exist, 
and are inevitable; they are tremendous in 
scale and results; they carry with them their 
own laws of conduct. And the real test of un- 
belief lies there, and nowhere else. 


BOOK I 
GOD 


RAR 
IBN, (C1 RUSS TEIN, leva Elec! 


17 


GLEA ER hha 


GOD IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 


I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and 
earth—The Apostles’ Creed. 


The Christian faith is a chain of positive 
truths, the first and greatest of which affirms 
the existence of God. “In the beginning— 
God.”’ These are the first syllables in the 
story of the universe, the starting point of 
Christian belief. ‘“Theism,’ says Professor 
Gwatkin, “has been the greatest force in his- 
tory, and remains the general belief of serious 
men.” And before considering the inevitable 
alternatives to that fundamental truth, it is 
worth while to put, in plain and untheological 
language, what the Christian faith at this point 
teaches. 

But in what words shall Christian belief 
about God express itself? The subtleties of 


metaphysics, the formule of logic, even the 
19 


20 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


definitions of theology, seem to have no office 
in this realm. What the soul asks is rather, as 
Dr. Parker says, the six wing's of Isaiah’s ser- 
aph, with twain to cover our face, with twain 
to cover our feet, and twain with which to fly. 

It is easy to multiply stately phrases about 
God. He is eternal in existence, measureless 
in power, stainless in holiness, of goodness 
infinite. All the forces of nature are but the 
expression of his energy. All its life 1s the 
creation of his breath. All its beauty is the 
signature of his wisdom. But as a vehicle for 
expressing the conception of God, language 
fails or betrays us; and thought is scarcely less 
adequate than speech where God is its object. 

If we take all noblest and highest things 
within the range of our senses—the majesty 
that dwells in the height of the heavens, the 
daily repeated glory of the dawn, the flame- 
pictures of the sunset, the ordered splendor of 
the stars; and if to such heights and depths of 
material glory we add the great things of the 
spiritual order—all that is purest in the saint, 
and wisest in the sage, and tenderest in human 


GOD IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 21 


affection; and if we multiply these by innumer- 
able degrees, and to infinite heights, we have 
yet not reached an adequate conception of God. 

There is no human measure of his glory. 
The curve of our thought is too low for the 
conception of his greatness. Our broken terms 
of love fail to interpret the wonder of his love. 
Our yesterdays and tomorrows cannot express 
his eternity. 

We take the great and resounding words of 
human speech, and describe God as Almighty, 
Eternal, the Invisible, the King of kings and 
Lord of lords. But the phrases give us only 
faint and broken aspects of God. We can 
speak of him only in stammering phrases that 
are in conflict with each other. He dwells in 
the height of the heavens; nay, the heaven of 
heavens cannot contain him. And yet he 
dwells, too, in the cup of the violet; he is pres- 
ent in the joy of a little child, in the sigh of 
the broken and contrite heart. He guides the 
planets through space. But he watches, too, 
the flight of the sparrow; he numbers the foot- 
steps of a child. , 


22 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


He is unthinkable, dwelling afar, in that 
light to which no man can approach; and yet 
—it is the paradox of his glory!—he gives 
himself to our human thought in the nearest, 
sweetest, simplest terms. “God, who com- 
manded the light to shine out of darkness, hath 
shined in our hearts to give the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ.’ Soa human face, written with 
the characters of a love which shines on us 
through suffering, is the highest interpretation 
of the unseen and infinite God. And if we 
might choose the form in which this Eternal 
and Almighty God—the God of infinite hol1- 
ness, who is yet the Father of our spirits— 
should come to us, would we not ask that it 
might be in human terms; in the shape which, 
for what is best in us, has most of appealing 
power; in the vision, that is, of a love which 
stoops to uttermost sacrifice for us? 

Oh, wonderful God! At once so high, and 
yet so lowly; so far off, and yet so near. His 
holiness is the terror of our sin. His will is 
the law and measure of our duty. His love 


Gop IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 23 


is the hope of our penitence. His fidelity 1s 
the pledge of our happiness. “God,” says 
Dr. Parker, “is a Fire that cannot be touched; 
a Life too great for shape or image; a Love 
for which there is no equal name.” And when 
all the subtleties and capacities of language 
have been exhausted to express what God is, 
and have failed us, somehow we find that the 
little and familiar words of human speech best 
present him to our faith: “God is love,” “God 
is light,” “God is a Spirit,” “a God of Chute 
“our Father in heaven.” Here is a golden 
chain of creeds, each in words of one syllable! 

The God of Christian faith is not an im- 
personal energy, “a stream of tendency,” “a 
Power not ourselves,” whether making for 
righteousness or not. How could love awaken 
toward an intangible Force? How could 
prayer whisper its petition to a “stream of 
tendency,” or hope cling to it? God is a Per- 
son; and we find the witness, and proof of the 
personality of God in the deep, imperishable 
sense of personality in ourselves. This is the 
central fact of our own nature. Moral quali- 


24 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


ties would be impossible without it. All the 
relationships of life would perish if it did not 
exist. And it is incredible that God can have 
given his creatures something greater than he 
possesses himself. 

At these great heights, it may be admitted, 
it is easy for human feet to stumble and 
human thought to fail. We are tempted to 
ask what room is there for our poor little per- 
sonality in God’s universe? Is not that uni- 
verse filled and possessed by his infinite person- 
ality? What is the dividing line betwixt his 
personality and ours? Must not our personal- 
ity be lost in his? 

A diluted Hegelianism has for the moment 
become popular; it teaches that God is not a 
person, but Personality itself. All other per- 
sonalities are but so many thoughts of the 
Divine Mind, rays of the Divine Consciousness. 
God has created the universe only as a mode of 
realizing himself; and he has no other con- 
sciousness than the sum total of consciousness 
among his creatures. But this is a meta- 
physical puzzle; it cannot survive translation 


Gop IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 25 


into clear speech. If we conceive of our per- 
sonality melting into God’s personality, moral- 
ity itself must perish, for all acts become God’s 
acts. This is the doctrine of Hegel, and of a 
philosophy older than Hegel, but it is a philoso- 
phy that has failed. It hides God behind a haze 
of metaphysics; it certainly leaves no ground 
for sober Christian faith. That faith affirms 
not only the infinite personality of God but the 
indestructible personality of man. 

The personality of God, it must be admitted, 
is a conception too great for the human mind, 
but its denial is a vaster incrédibility than its 
assertion. The logic which vindicates Chris- 
tian faith at this point can be packed into a 
very brief compass. Truth, goodness, and love, 
we are sure, are attributes of God. What is 
truth but the infinite and absolute in thought, 
or goodness but the infinite and absolute in 
will, or love but the infinite and absolute in feel- 
ing? Now, if God be truth, he thinks; if he be 
goodness, he wills; if he be love, he feels. But 
truth, goodness, love, are the qualities Ohi 
person. “They are the characteristic,” says 


26 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Principal Garvie, in the Hibbert Journal (p. 
567), “of consciousness. They have meaning 
only within self-consciousness.” ‘To deny per- 
sonality to God is to deny at once that he 
possesses either truth, goodness, or love—a 
denial that is worse than atheism. 

It is because God is a Person that he is 
capable of personal relations with his creatures. 
Ts it thinkable that an imperfect human spirit 
can come nearer to a fellow-spirit, equally im- 
perfect, than God, the Father of our spirits, can 
come to us all? Of all relationships possible to 
us none is so close, none so sweet, none so sure, 
as that into which God comes. 

Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. 

It is commonly said that to ascribe such qual- 
ities to God is only a proof of the tyranny of 
anthropomorphic conceptions. But what is dis- 
honoring to God in such conceptions? We do 
not degrade the Almighty by saying that he 
thinks and knows and wills. “If the power be- 
hind nature were destitute of these faculties,” 
says Professor Momerie, “it would be infinitely 
inferior to the poorest type of man. . . . In 


Gop IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 27 


power, as such, there is nothing divine. What 
care I for a Power that is eternally uncon- 
scious? It may have strength enough to dash 
the entire universe into shivers; but let me 
realize that it is senseless, and I look upon it 
with contempt.” 

The Christian conception of God, it is to be 
noted, grows ever higher as our knowledge of 
his methods and the scale of his works in- 
creases. Science, wisely read, does not rebuke 
faith at this point; rather, it endows it with a 
new vision, and kindles it to a new exultation. 
God is better known to us than he was to our 
fathers. David saw the glory of God written 
in the heavens, and he tells us in the music of 
a great psalm how the sight affected him. But 
how much of those heavens did David know? 
He could not pierce their heights, nor count the 
multitude of the stars, as we have learned to 
do. He spelled out only the first syllables of 
their mystic speech. He never saw more than 
the mere outlying scouts of the great army of 
rushing planets, and never imagined more than 
those he saw. 


28 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


But for us, with each new discovery of 
science the heavens grow wider, and higher, 
and crowded with yet vaster hosts. We have 
learned that in their depths a thousand million 
stars are wheeling; and so we have a vision of 
the scale of God’s thoughts such as no saint or 
prophet of olden days had. 

We have another revelation, too, of God, of 
which the earlier ages never dreamed. Science 
is teaching us that God is in things infinitesimal 
as surely, and on a scale as great, as he is in 
things that are vast. When we untwist the 
last and innermost thread of matter we find 
God there, hiding the splendors of his omnipo- 
tence in the curve of an atom. The vision of 
a hundred million stars, hung in the heights 
and depths of space, is hardly so wonderful as 
that latest discovery of science—a constellation 
hidden in every molecule; so that the dust be- 
neath our feet has, burning in it, unseen stars 
as wonderful in their minuteness, as swift and 
steadfast in their tiny orbits, as Uranus and 
Sirius are in their vastness. And since God 
must be as great in spiritual as he is in physical 


Gop IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 29 


terms, redemption gains, in this way, an ever 
new credibility from each new discovery of 
science. 

The cross of Calvary, with its tremendous 
significance, could hardly find standing ground 
beneath the low skies of early human knowl- 
edge. But the measureless heavens, as we have 
learned to know them, rising ever higher, the 
scale of the physical universe, with its con- 
stantly expanding horizons, by the index they 
offer to our very senses of the curve of God’s 
thoughts in the lowest circles of his universe, 
make credible the incredible story of our re- 
demption. 

The last and highest word about God that 
Christian faith knows is that great saying of 
Saint John—“God is love.” So we believe the 
universe is built on love; it is shaped to ends of 
love; it is moving to a goal of love. And 
Christian ethics are but love translated into 
terms of duty. All human obligations are 
summed up in the terms of love. Not the intel- 
lect, but love, is the organ of spiritual knowl- 
edge. “Everyone that loveth is born of God, 


30 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


and knoweth God. He that loveth not, know- 
eth not God; for God is love. . . . God 1s 
love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in 
God, and God in him.” 

There is a divine accent in such words. 
They break in on us from another realm than 
any merely human literature knows. Here is 
a strain of the music of heaven stealing across 
the discords of earth. Law, on this reading, 
is but the name for an impulse, an emotion, 
a spiritual mood, by which the creature is 
knitted into eternal moral harmony, not only 
with the Creator, but with his whole unsin- 
ning creation. 

This conception of God is the key which un- 
locks all the mysteries of the universe. It ex- 
plains how the universe came into being. It 
explains the height of the star-filled heavens, 
the energy which floods all space, the march of 
the seasons, the beauty of the sea and of the 
flowers. It explains, too, the holiness of the 
saint, the courage of the martyr, the child’s 
gladness, the mother’s passion of tenderness. 
Oh, naked, desolate, dreadful universe, if God 


GoD IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 31 


did not exist in it, and rule over it, and make 
it the servant of his purpose, and the reflex of 
his character! 

For what is the guarantee to us of the order 
of the universe? Why are we sure that the 
stars will not break loose, that some vagrant 
comet may not wreck the earth, that the daily 
miracle of the dawn will continue, that the. 
march of the seasons will still 

bring the flower again, 
And bring the firstlings to the flock? 

Science shows that the earth, to its utter- 
most atom, and the whole depth of space 
through which the earth is rushing, thrill with 
terrific forces. What assurance have we that 
they may not at any moment destroy us? 

We talk of ‘the constancy of nature’; but 
constancy is a quality of character, and the 
constancy of nature is but the expression in 
physical terms of the character of God. The 
anima mundi is a well-known phrase in philos- 
ophy and is the favorite pantheistic name for 
God; but in a wiser sense than pantheism 
knows, and with a loftier meaning than philos- 


32 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


ophy can teach, Christian faith believes God to 
be the Soul of the universe. This lifts the 
scheme of nature up into the realms of purpose, 
and makes it the instrument and servant of 
character. A living human body without a 
soul, a mindless thing, incapable of reasoned 
purpose, would be a scandal and peril to its 
kind. And this is what the universe must be 
apart from God. God is the divine Soul of the 
universe; and this anima mundi stands to us 
in a relationship which he himself interprets 
to us by the words, “Our Father.” 


CHAPTER [II 
THE EvipENCES FoR FAItH IN Gop 


The whole diversity of created things could have its origin 
only in the ideas and the will of a necessarily Existing Being. 
—Sir Isaac NEWTON. 


What are the evidences for this great faith? 
“There are many proofs,’ says Professor 
Gwatkin, “but no demonstration.” God can- 
not be packed into a syllogism, or “proved” in 
terms of logic. But neither can anyone prove, 
in terms of logic, that the world exists, or that 
we ourselves exist! The three final postulates 
of thought are God, the world, and ourselves; 
and they are all incapable of absolute meta- 
physical proof. Who limits his belief to that 
which can be demonstrated, in terms of formal 
logic, must deny them all; and all, as a matter 
of fact, have been denied. “Must we have 
logical demonstration of that which underlies 
logic? Must we see God in the sky, as Lalande 
scoffs, or get him into our laboratories, for 


analysis, before we are persuaded?” 
33 


34. THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Demand for logical proof in relation to God 
is absurd, and yet what an energy of logic is 
arrayed on the side of Christian belief! Many 
so-called ‘‘evidences” of God’s existence touch 
only the fringe of things, but others run back 
into eternal certainties. Let us take two—and 
they are but samples—one resting on the very 
structure of the visible universe, and one 
wrought into the structure of our own minds. 

The highest expression of mind is to take 
a number of unconscious, unrelated physical 
things, and set them in relations which make 
them the channel of a meaning of which they 
are unconscious, the servants of an intelligent 
purpose of which they know nothing. Such an 
office laid on material things, or extracted from 
them, is only possible in terms of mind. 

The letters of the alphabet, for example, are 
a cluster of unrelated symbols, each standing 
for one of those separate air waves called 
sound. But put together in a certain order they 
make a proposition in Euclid, or a sonnet by 
Keats. Now, it is certain that the letters them- 
selves could not construct the theorem, or set 


Tue EvIDENCES FOR FAITH IN GOD 35 


the cadences of the sonnet chiming. Behind 
the unconscious symbols, and using them as its 
servants, is the mind of the geometrician, the 
imagination of the poet. 

The seven notes of music are in nature, and 
exist independently of man: but they are 
merely a succession of vibrations in the mind- 
less air. Beethoven knits them by subtle and 
innumerable harmonies and contrasts to each 
other, till deep calls to deep, and an ordered 
tumult of sweet sounds is born, making perfect 
music. The wedded harmonies of the great 
fugue are more than the notes of the octave. 
The ‘Moonlight Sonata” is the seven notes, 
plus Beethoven. 

Now, exactly as the twenty-six letters of the 
alphabet could not make Hamlet without the 
mind of Shakespeare behind them, or as the 
seven notes of the octave must have the genius 
of Handel flowing through them before the 
“Hallelujah Chorus” is born, so the unrelated 
elements of the physical universe must have an 
infinite and controlling Mind behind them, and 
making them the servants of intelligent pur- 


36 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


pose, before the order of the worlds is born. 
That the physical universe is a unit is a final 
proof of God’s existence, for that unity is born 
of the relations of things, relations woven by 
what must be the energies of an Infinite Mind. 

The ordered unity of the material universe 
is taken for granted. “Here,” in the words of 
Martineau, “is a network of universal media, 
which weaves the contents of space into one 
system: a running thread of progressive his- 
tory blending all Time into one drama.” But 
the miracle it represents—the miracle of an 
incalculable number of things so knitted to- 
gether into relation and interdependence with 
each other that they produce a common result 
—is not realized. 

The stars are separated, yet every particle 
in each is at play with every particle in all 
other stars, to farthest Sirius. Is there any 
rhythm, indeed, born in the poet’s brain, or 
woven of music in Chopin or Mendelssohn, like 
the rhythm of the worlds, the unjarring har- 
monies of the planets? Still less can any har- 
mony born of wedded sound in music represent 


Tur EvipENCES FOR FAITH IN GOD 37 


the concord and agreement with each other of 
all the separate forces which make the physical 
universe ! 

The universe is concrete music. It is a song 
of which God is the singer; a poem with stars 
for syllables, and the measureless forces that 
rush through space for melody. If the letters 
of the alphabet cannot make Hamlet without 
the mind of Shakespeare behind them; if the 
seven notes of the octave must have the genius 
of Handel flowing through them before the 
“Hallelujah Chorus” is possible, how certain it 
is that the unrelated elements and forces of the 
physical universe must have an Infinite Mind, 
using them as its servants, and setting them in 
terms of mind, before the order of the worlds 
can exist. 

And how far this miracle of coordinating 
purpose—the supreme act and proof of mind 
—extends! It is, we are sure, coextensive with 
the physical universe. Its existence is the 
constant and most certain presupposition of 
science. Its disappearance would be the wreck 
of science. Imagine intelligence standing 


38 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


amazed in a realm where chance reigned, and 
law was unknown! The Mind which thus 
stamps itself on the whole universe, in charac- 
ters of purpose visible even to our dim intelli- 
gence, must be infinite; and there is no cer- 
tainty known to reason more absolute than that 
such a Mind exists. 

The absolute proof of God’s existence is thus 
found in the relations in which the mindless 
elements of the universe are set with each 
other, producing an order of which they are 
not only incapable, but unconscious. 

An equally absolute proof of the existence of 
God is found, again, wrought into the very 
constitution of the human mind. The intellect 
is so made that, whatever it may pretend to do, 
it cannot accept an endless succession of sec- 
ond causes;.a chain with no first link. An 
Ultimate Cause, itself uncaused, is a necessity 
of thought; and the qualities of this Cause, we 
cannot escape believing, are interpreted by its 
effects. It must be rational, since the universe 
is built on terms of reason. It must be moral, 
or whence comes conscience? It must be per- 


Tue EvIDENCES FOR FAITH IN GOD 39 


sonal, or how is it that we are endowed with 
personality? Anda First Cause which is ra- 
tional, moral, and personal—is God! 

“It is impossible,” says Herbert Spencer, “‘to 
avoid making the assumption of self-existence 
somewhere.” All the creeds, in fact, begin 
with exactly that assumption. Atheism as- 
sumes the self-existence of matter; pantheism 
assumes the self-existence of everything; the 
Christian faith rests on the self-existence of 
God. As William Arthur argues, in his Reli- 
gion Without God, we are shut up to one or 
other of three conceivable starting points: An 
Eternal Nothing, which originated both mind 
and matter; Eternal Matter, which originated 
mind; or an Eternal Mind, which originated 
all things. The first assumption is inconceiv- 
able; the second is impossible and absurd; the 
third is the only theory in which the sane mind 
can finally rest. And it is the creed of Chris- 
tianity! “Belief in God is the first instinct, 
and the last conviction, of sane intelligence.” 

But are there no difficulties in this great 
creed, no shadows in the glory of God’s nature? 


40 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Yes; theology would be incredible if it were 
not dark with mystery. In this realm, finite 
thought wanders amid infinities. “The power 
which the universe manifests to us,” says Her- 
bert Spencer, “is utterly inscrutable.” But in 
these words he is only repeating unconsciously 
the challenge of Scripture: “Who can know 
the Almighty unto perfection?” “Clouds and 
darkness are round about him.” How can the 
Infinite be uttered in terms of the finite? 

And there are mysteries and difficulties, not 
only in the very conception of God, but in 
the facts of his universe. How can it be 
otherwise? We see only one tiny point in the 
great curve of God’s plan: we have the record 
of only one brief moment in the history of 
his universe. But Christian faith, while it 
admits that “clouds and darkness are round 
about him,” still affirms with rejoicing con- 
fidence that “righteousness and judgment are 
the habitation of his throne.” ‘“God’s way is 
in the deep, his path is in the great waters; 
his judgments are not known.” But through 
all the ages that lie behind us, and still, today, 


Tue EvIDENCES FOR FAITH IN GOD 41 


he leads the souls that trust in him like a flock, 
though it is by hands, and in paths, and toward 
a goal, they cannot see. 

Oh blessed faith! “When I kneel’—says 
that true saint and fine thinker, William Arthur 
—‘‘when I kneel at the throne of grace, and 
say, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven,’ it seems 
as if all my being were flooded with the light 
of a countenance full of unutterable life and 
loves. Lhow art a shield) for,me, licry; 2 
shield for me. My glory, and the lifter-up of 
my head.’ Yea! even so. And therefore unto 
the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, the 
only wise God, be honor and glory forever. 
And let all the people say Amen! This, then, 
be our witness before the living and the un- 
born: we which have believed do enter into 
rest!” 


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THE ALTERNATIVE TO BELIEF IN 
GOD 


43 


CHARTERS 
ATHEISM 


The atheistic theory is not only absolutely unthinkable; but, 
even if it were thinkable, it would not be a solution.— HERBERT 
SPENCER. 


The alternatives to the Christian faith about 
God are easily named. “It is impossible,” to 
quote Herbert Spencer once more, “to avoid 
making the assumption of self-existence some- 
where.’ We may believe, with the atheist, in 
the self-existence of matter; or, with the pan- 
theist, in the self-existence of everything; or, 
with the Christian, in the self-existence of God. 
Or we may deny all three with the agnostic. 
But he who rejects the belief of Christianity 
as to God must put in its place one of these 
three—atheism, pantheism, agnosticism. 

It might be imagined that pantheism, as an 
alternative to Christianity, could be dismissed 
almost without debate. The word is used in 
literature as a label, but does any sane man 
under civilized skies really hold the creed 


behind the label, with all the consequences 
45 


46 Tue BeLiers oF UNBELIEF 


which follow from that creed? Yet pantheism, 
it cannot be denied, has inspired some famous 
books, captured some great thinkers—on the 
Continent at least—and yielded some pictur- 
esque philosophies. But, stripped of all in- 
senious disguises, what is the hard and naked 
quality of its teaching? 

Pantheism starts with a very different pre- 
miss to atheism; but, paradoxal as it may seem, 
it arrives at the same conclusion. Atheism 
denies any creation, since there is no Creator. 
Pantheism denies creation too, but it is because 
there is no creature! 

But there are darker shadows still in this 
dark creed. On the pantheistic theory God did 
not create the universe. He is the universe— 
all that is dark in it, as well as all that is bright. 
Everything is but a disguise of God. All acts 
are, directly or indirectly, his acts; all wills are 
but modes of his will, all characters disguises 
of his character. He has no other conscious- 
ness than the sum total of consciousness his 
creatures possess. His personality is only the 
aggregate of all other personalities. 


ATHEISM A7 


Everything is God; evil as truly as good, 
falsehood as surely as truth, cruelty as pity, 
Jack the Ripper as well as Paul the saint; the 
lust of the brothel, the tortures of Russian 
prison cells, the obscenities of African obi-wor- 
ship, as truly as the love of the mother and the 
courage of the martyr. The atheist who denies 
there is a God is himself a mode of God, 
and his atheism is a reflection of something 
in God—if it is only of God’s doubts about 
himself! 

This is a dreadful creed, a denial at once of 
personality in man and of perfect goodness in 
God. It teaches the divinity of evil as well as 
of good. On this theory there zs no sin, unless 
God himself is the’ sinner. 

This doctrine cuts the very roots of all ethics. 
It is not reason but the mere bewilderment and 
scandal of reason. To ask what argument sus- 
tains such a theory is absurd. According to it 
we are all machines, or rather will-less bits of 
that great machine we call the universe. Why 
ask one little fragment of the machine for an 
argument to prove that the machine exists? It 


48 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


is like asking the grease-box of a steam engine 
for a philosophy of the engine itself. 

There remain two possible alternatives to 
theistic Christianity, atheism and agnosticism, 
and each may be considered in the briefest pos- 
sible terms. | 

It seems, perhaps, to the sober mind, incredi- 
ble that, outside a lunatic asylum, atheism can 
exist. To waste ink or argument upon it is 
slaying the dead. But atheism is, unhappily, a 
real creed for many; for some, indeed, it is a 
creed proclaimed in almost arrogant accents. 
In the last French census nearly five million 
people wrote themselves down “atheists.” On 
the Continent there are many writers who 
would repeat Feuerbach’s words: “It is clear 
as the sun, and evident as the day, that there is 
no God; and, still more, that there can be no 
God.” 

And we need not emigrate to foreign skies to 
discover atheism. Mrs. Besant, in her Gospel 
of Atheism, declares that “‘the name ‘atheist’ is 
one of the grandest titles a man can wear. It 
is the order of merit of the world’s heroes.” 


ATHEISM AQ 


She grows lyrical in praise of atheism. “Its 
soil,” she cries, “bears the fairest flowers and 
the strongest trees. Over it sweep the purest 
winds and shine the warmest suns!” 

But thereisanearer and more deadly atheism 
than any which finds expression in words. It 
is a vague sense—lying like some deadly vapor 
on multitudes of souls, stealing like some 1n- 
visible but poisonous taint into men’s blood— 
that the existence of God is doubtful. It has 
never been proved. Perhaps, after all, he does 
not exist! And this nebulous idea has for those 
whom it possesses, the fatal offices of an opiate. 
It drugs the conscience. It shuts out the spir- 
itual universe. It acts as a blindness, obscur- 
ing the heavens. It makes life, in a literal 
sense, godless. 

It is worth while, if only for a moment, to 
look seriously at atheism as a definite creed; 
to assess its meaning and evidences, and the 
ethics natural to it. 

Atheism is the most spacious and tremen- 
dous of negatives. “There is no God”: a creed 
of four words, but how much dark significance 


50 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


is shut up in the brief syllables! The heavens, 
it declares, are empty. The world has no 
Maker. Life has no Judge. Conscience has 
no law, or has none speaking to it from any 
spiritual realm. The visible universe is an 
accident. It has no creative Mind above it, 
and no intelligent purpose within it. 

Now, it is an intellectual absurdity to ask 
for the “proofs” of atheism. It is clear at the 
outset, and without argument, that this is a 
creed essentially incapable of proof. A univer- 
sal negative of this sort is unthinkable. Proof 
of it—if it exists—is possible only to universal 
knowledge. To reach the great certainty that 
there is no God, “what ages and what lights,” 
asks John Foster, “are requisite for this attain- 
ment?’ Ina classic and oft-quoted passage, 
Foster argues that a man must himself possess 
the attributes of God before he can be entitled 
to declare that no God exists. 

He must be omnipresent to be sure of his 
creed, for if there is any realm from which he 
is absent, God may be there! He must be 
omniscient, for if there is any fact he does not 


ATHEISM 51 


know, perhaps that unknown truth is the fact 
that God exists. 

How shall a finite intelligence, set on a little 
island in the measureless ocean of space, and 
whose existence, measured against the dura- 
tion of the universe, is less than the tick of a 
clock, reach such a stupendous height and cer- 
tainty of knowledge as to entitle it to proclaim 
to the shuddering worlds, “There is no God”! 

Atheism, moreover, is in deep and eternal 
quarrel with the very structure of the human 
mind. Here, lying about us, is the visible 
universe. It has to be explained; and every 
creed, in effect, is an explanation of the unt- 
verse. Now, to say, with atheism, that the visi- 
ble universe has no Maker, is to declare it to 
be that unthinkable thing—that impossible 
thing—a stupendous effect without a Cause. 
A creed which sets out with such a proposition 
deserves to be treated as being simply a foolish 
jest. We cannot, if we would, believe in so 
much as an old shoe without a shoemaker. And 
to assert of the majestic system of things about 
us, graven with characters of a design to its 


52 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


minutest atom, flooded, as our very senses teach 
us, with all the attributes of mind, that no 
designing Mind is behind it, that it sprang 
uncaused out of nothing—this is the wildest 
unreason. 

The denial of any antecedent cause neces- 
sarily involves the denial of any beginning; so 
atheism, carried a step further back, means the 
assertion that the universe has existed through 
infinite past time. This theory Herbert Spen- 
cer says is “unthinkable,” and, therefore, im- 
possible. It is a more direct and simple answer 
to say that such a theory is in open quarrel with 
plain facts. That the world had a beginning in 
time, geology and astronomy amply prove; and 
if it had a starting point, it must have an end. 

“The existence of an Ultimate Cause is the 
highest of all our certitudes,’ says Herbert 
Spencer, in one of his latest writings.* Belief 
in an Ultimate Cause is that august thing, “a 
necessary datum of thought.” “Among our 
beliefs,” Spencer declares, “this has the high- 
est validity of any.” All that remains to be 


1 Nineteenth Century, No. 89, p. 6. 


ATHEISM 53 


asked is whether the nature’and character of 
this Cause are reflected in the universe he—or 
it—has created; whether, having endowed us 
with personality, it is a Person; whether hav- 
ing given us intelligence, it is itself intelligent; 
whether, having placed us in the moral order, 
it is itself moral? If so, this Ultimate Cause 
is exactly what Christian faith declares it to 
be—an Infinite and Eternal Spirit, the Father 
of our spirits, the Almighty Creator of heaven 
and earth. 

The mind can, perhaps, run back in imagina- 
tion, and conceive of the self-existence of space, 
and of nothing else; of space without either 
mind or matter or motion init. But, then, how 
shall mind and matter and motion come out of 
it? “Infinite space and no matter in it, no mind 
in it, no force or motion in it—is this,” asks 
William Arthur, “to be the mother of the uni- 
verse?’ Does anyone wonder that this con- 
ception of “Nothing, distinguished from all 
other nothings by the power to develop into 
Something,” is dismissed by Herbert Spencer 
as “an absurdity”? 


54 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


To Spencer himself atheism was frankly in- 
tolerable. Even the “unthinkable abstraction” 
which, in the earlier stages of his thinking, he 
put in the place of God, came, in later stages, to 
be recognized as too thin and naked a concep- 
tion. So Spencer invents a whole procession 
of sonorous phrases for it—phrases which 
grew steadily more concrete and definite “until 
at last,’ as Frederic Harrison complained, “it 
emerges as the Ultimate Reality, the Inscru- 
table Existence, the Creative Power, the In- 
finite and Eternal Energy by which all things 
are created and sustained.” 

The fashion in which Herbert Spencer tried 
to fill up the empty heaven of his faith with 
sounding names is only an illustration of the 
fact—discoverable everywhere in the sad 
realms of unbelief—that the human mind, by 
some deep and mysterious instinct, resents a 
vacuum where faith ought to be. It is intol- 
erant of an empty heaven. The very atheism 
which declares the throne of the universe is 
vacant insists upon putting Something upon it. 

Comte, for example, having denied the exist- 


ATHEISM 55 


ence of a God, proceeded to invent, as a sub- 
stitute, his “Grand Etre.” He proposed to his 
followers, as an object of worship, the sum 
total of humanity, minus its useless members, 
and plus a percentage of the more helpful ani- 
mals. “We begin,” says William Arthur, 
“with an unknown sum of past, present, and 
future men; from this we are told to subtract 
an unknown sum total of useless men; and to 
the remainder we are told to add a fourth un- 
known sum of helpful animals.” 

The four unknowns, put together, were to 
make one great Known, the Supreme Being of 
M. Comte. The first sum total was an abstrac- 
tion; the sum deducted was an abstraction; the 
result is an unknown fraction of an unknow- 
able abstraction. And this is the “Grand Etre” 
which, as an object of worship, Comte thinks 
will take the place of God! No wonder that it 
kindled the scorn of a strong if skeptical intel- 
lect like that of Huxley. “That the incongru- 
ous mixture of bad science and eviscerated 
papistry out of which Comte manufactured the 
positive religion will be the heir of the ages,” 


56 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


he writes, “I have too much respect for the 
humanity of the future to believe. The Posi- 
tivist asks me to worship Humanity; that 1s, 
to adore the generalized conception of men as 
they ever have been, and probably ever will be. 
I must reply that I could just as soon bow down 
and worship the generalized conception of a 
wilderness of apes.”’ 

Atheism, since it dismisses an intelligent 
Maker from the universe, must regard that 
universe as the product of chance; and this 1s 
the fact which made atheism intolerable to 
Darwin. “The impossibility of conceiving that 
this grand and wondrous universe, with our 
conscious selves, arose through chance, seems 
to me,” he declared, “‘the chief argument for 
the existence of God.” 

It is possible to express in arithmetical terms 
the vast incredibility that the physical universe 
is the product of chance. “When only eleven 
planets were known, De Morgan showed,” says 
Professor Momerie, “that the odds against 
their moving in one direction round the sun, 
with a slight inclination of the planes of their 


/ 


ATHEISM 57 


orbits—had chance determined the movement 
—would have been twenty billion to one. And 
this movement of the planets is but a single 
item, a tiny detail, an infinitesimal fraction, in 
a universe which—in spite of all arguments to 
the contrary—still appears to be pervaded 
through and through with purpose. Let every 
being now alive upon the earth spend the rest 
of his days and nights in writing down arith- 
metical figures, let the enormous numbers 
which these figures would represent—each 
number forming a library in itselfi—be all 
added together, let this result be squared, 
cubed, multiplied by itself ten thousand times, 
and the final product would still fall infinitely 
short of expressing the probabilities against 
the world having being evolved by chance.” 
Let it be repeated that atheism is eternally 
and essentially incapable of proof. It is a 
guess. And, regarded as a guess, it has every 
hateful quality. It leaves the reason like a 
fluttering and dying bird in an atmosphere ex- 
hausted of oxygen. It wraps the imagination 
in darkness. It blackens the heavens. It pro- 


58 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


claims the human race to be Fatherless. It 
empties the universe of purpose. This complex 
web of unresting energies is a machine, not 
only without a Maker, but without an end be- 
fore it, or a mind within it. 

What conception can be more terrifying to 
the imagination than that of a mindless uni- 
verse! We are passengers in a train rushing 
at maddest speed, but whither we cannot tell. 
There are no signals on this line; no engineer 
has laid the rails; no driver is on the foot-plate. 
Happiness, for us, depends on the presence of 
certain qualities in the universe—love, fore- 
sight, justice, righteousness. But these are 
personal qualities; and since there is no per- 
sonal God these things are not to be found in 
the system to which we belong. We are an or- 
phan race, wandering under pitiless and empty 
skies. 

Who would open his soul to such a creed 
unless whipped into the acceptance of it by 
the iron scourge of irresistible proofs? But 
atheism is a creed necessarily and eternally 
naked of all proofs. 


CHAPTERTI 
THE Etuics oF ATHEISM 


Unbelief saves itself from universal contempt by really liv- 
ing on a wider faith than it allows. ... What if unbelief 
should live up to its creed!—NEWMAN SMYTH. 


What, it may be asked, are the ethics natural 
to the creed of atheism? 

From a Christian standpoint, atheism can 
never be translated into conduct, or be accepted 
as a basis of conduct, without an element of 
wickedness. Taken logically, it is nothing bet- 
ter than a guess; certainty about his theory of 
the universe is, for the atheist, in the nature 
of things impossible. Now, to act on the tre- 
mendous negative, “There is no God,’ may be 
morally justifiable when certainty is reached; 
but short of that certainty, it is nothing less 
than wickedness. 

Shall the measureless obligations under 
which—if God exists, and is our Judge—we 
all stand, be dismissed on the chance that there 
is no God? That chance must become cer- 

59 


60 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


tainty before it supplies a law for conduct; and 
yet any such certainty is impossible. To hold 
atheism as a creed is to quarrel with reason; 
but to act on it as a law is to break with in- 
stinctive and rudimentary morality. 

Looked at as opposing creeds, it will be seen 
that Christianity and atheism are, at this point, 
parted by one profound difference. Christian- 
ity is a theory of the world which, reason de- 
clares, ought to be acted upon as if it were 
true, until it is disproved. It is a creed which 
the sane man must wish to be true. It fills the 
sky with sunshine. It floods the universe with 
gracious purpose. It is a challenge to the soul, 
putting it under the sway of great motives, and 
calling it to high standards. Moreover, to act 
on the Christian theory carries with it no risks, 
even if in the end it be disproved. For if, in 
that last moment when time ends, it dissolves 
into a dream, the Christian has been better for 
it while he lived, and will be no worse for it 
when he is dead. At the moment of death—if 
there actually be no God—believer and unbe- 
liever will drop out of existence on equal terms, 


THe Eruics or ATHEISM (oni 


into that eternal and dreamless sleep which, on 
the atheistic theory, awaits the soul. 

But the exact opposite, at every point, is true 
of atheism. True or false, it is a hateful creed. 
It has for the universe the office of an eclipse. 
It stretches out empty skies over a Fatherless 
world. It cuts the very sinews of morality. 
Everyone must wish it to be untrue. No one 
ought to act upon it till it is proved up to the 
point. where doubt becomes impossible. And 
what tremendous risks pursue it! The atheist 
treats God as nonexistent in his own universe; 
he dismisses his claims as worthless; he puts 
aside his love as a fool’s dream. And he does 
all this on the strength of a guess. He sur- 
renders transcendent hopes, and betrays obli- 
gations which, if they exist, are overwhelming, 
on the authority of what must be called debat- 
ing society logic. What other human being 
risks so much on a warrant so frail! 

Many atheists, thank God! are good men; 
but this is in spite of their creed. When Shel- 
ley wrote “atheos” after his name on Mont 
Auvert he was on fire with a generous hate of 


62 Tur BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


wrong, which burned from a divine source. 
Atheists are often better, as Christians are 
often, alas! worse, than their own creed. And 
it must be remembered that even the man who 
denies that God exists breathes an atmosphere 
charged with the idea of God and with the 
great moral forces which stream into human 
life from that idea. 

But the point to be considered is what, on its 
own principles, and on its principles carried to 
their logical conclusions, is the morality of 
atheism; and to that question the answer is 
clear. 

Atheism is the denial of all authoritative 
ethics. Since there is no Lawgiver, there can 
be no law. The interval betwixt right and 
wrong is a geographical or social accident. 
There is no God, himself infinitely righteous, 
who enacts rightdoing, and will punish wrong- 
doing. All actions, impulses, motives, on the 
atheistic theory, have an equal right to exist. 
Hate is as natural as love; the rogue is as much 
a part of the system of things as the saint, Nero 
as Saint Paul. Why should not Nana Sahib 


THe Etuics or ATHEISM 63 


kill the women in the Murder House? The 
deed shocks us, looking at it across fifty years, 
but it gratified that cold-blooded Hindu at the 
moment; and on the atheistic theory his grati- 
fication is as legitimate a part of the system of 
things as our horror. 

On the principles of atheism, in brief, what 
final standard determining whether a given act 
is good or bad can exist? There are laws of 
society, but these vary with latitude and longi- 
tude. Slavery is a social law on the Congo, 
polygamy in Utah, the bowstring in Turkey, 
wife-killing in Annam. 

There is, again, the law of utility. Some 
acts in their consequences are beneficial to so- 
ciety, some are injurious. But if utility is our 
one standard, we must wait until the conse- 
quences of an act are known before we can 
determine whether it is to be approved or 
blamed. And who can measure the conse- 
quences of acts? When conscience, as the or- 
gan of the moral sense, and the interpreter of 
a divine law, has been dismissed, atheism can 
supply nothing which will take its place. 


64 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


The way to test the ethics of atheism is to 
imagine what the world would be with God 
dismissed from it, and all the motives and 
emotions and restraints that go with the con- 
ception of God canceled. What a desolate land- 
scape, lying under black and empty heavens, 
arises in the imagination at such a thought! 
From the root of belief in God a thousand great 
hopes, heroisms, aspirations, affections break 
into blossom like flowers at the whisper of some 
divine spring! If these suddenly perished, it 
would leave the world a desert. 

A world of atheists and conducted on atheis- 
tic principles! A society with its institutions, 
its literature, its politics, its domestic life un- 
touched by the great forces which stream from 
the idea of God! A race with a mindless uni- 
verse about it, a hopeless grave beneath it, and 
empty heavens above it! What would happen 
in such a world? Prayer would die, and all 
the forces which go with prayer. Worship of 
religion would perish. Grief could have no 
comfort, mystery no explanation, truth no nec- 
essary sacredness, loss no compensating equity. 


THE ETHICS OF ATHEISM 65 


In an atheistic home no mother would teach 
her child to pray. Love would be left with 
broken heart and empty hands, for what 
epitaph can atheism write upon a little child’s 
grave? The feet made beautiful because they 
bring good tidings would run no more on er- 
rands of pity to far-off lands and wild races. 
Can the human imagination picture a com- 
mittee of atheists starting off, at risk and cost 
to themselves, to transform savage races into 
a nobler type by the news that no God exists? 

A new cruelty would creep into the world’s 
politics and into its social life if atheism became 
universal. The whole conception of man would 
be changed. The great law of love—love 
which lifts its face toward God—would be un- 
written, for at the crown of the heavens there 
sits no God. And the twin and equal law of 
love—love flowing from man to man—would 
not survive. 

The sublime vision presented in the New 
Testament of the Son of God, the Judge of the 
race, in the hour of his judgment rewarding 
all service to man as service done to himself, 


66 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


and all neglect to man as neglect of himself, 
has done more to make pity a virtue, to lift 
beneficence up to the sacredness of a religion, 
than all the speculations of the philosophers, 
and all the maxims of the moralists. Christ 
stands behind the hunger of the poor, the lone- 
liness of the orphan. 


Who hates, hates Thee: who loves, becomes 
Therein to Thee allied; 

All sweet accords of hearts and homes 
In Thee are multiplied. 


Now, the unbelief that blotted out that belief 
would certainly kill pity as a duty. How could 
literature survive with universal atheism as its 
atmosphere! How could poetry sing, or fancy 
dream, or hope breathe? As well expect flow- 
ers to bloom under skies empty of light, or 
birds to sing in an atmosphere exhausted of 
oxygen. In a universe emptied of God, what 
strange terrors would steal out of the void into 
the chamber of man’s imagination. What cruel 
and obscene shapes would haunt the empty 
skies! Atheism has added to English litera- 
ture one singer—James Thomson—who, to 


THE Eruics oF ATHEISM 67 


something of real genius as a poet, added the 


gloom of utter unbelief. And looking at the 


world through the lens of his atheism, he sees 


it, and sings of it, as a “City of Dreadful 
Night”: 


The City is of Night; perchance of Death, 
But certainly of Night; for never there 
Can come the lucid morning’s fragrant breath, 
After the dewy morning’s cold, gray air; 
The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity; 
The sun has never visited that city, 
For it dissolveth in the daylight fair. 


The City is of Night, but not of sleep; 
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; 
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep, 
A night seems termless hell... . 


Thomson changes the scene of his poem 


from this terrible city to a desert equally ter- 


rible: 


As I came through the desert thus it was, 

As I came through the desert: All was black, 

In heaven no single star, on earth no track; 

A brooding hush, without a stir or note, 

The air so thick it clotted in my throat; 

And thus for hours; then some enormous things 

Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings; 
And I strode on, austere; 
No hope could have no fear. 


68 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


In that sad realm one soul bankrupt of faith 


calls to another: 
O brothers of sad lives! They are so brief: 
A few short years must bring us all relief; 
Can we not bear these years of laboring breath? 
But if you would not this poor life fulfill, 
Lo, you are free to end it when you will, 
Without the fear of waking after death. 


This unhappy poct, himself an atheist, holds 
that suicide is the final logic of consistent athe- 
ism. Through the city that John saw coming 
down from God out of heaven, there flows the 
river of the water of life. And in the “City of 
Dreadful Night” that atheism builds, this sad 
poet, too, sees a stream flowing; it is the river 
of suicides !— 


The mighty river, flowing dark and deep, 
With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides, 
Vague sounding through the City’s sleepless sleep, 

Is named the River of the Suicides; 
For night by night some lorn wretch, overweary, 
And shuddering from the future yet more dreary, 
Within its cold secure oblivion hides. 


It is clear that atheism is, or ought to be, a 
creed of tears. “ ‘There is no God.’ Is this,” 
asks Pascal, “a thing to be said with gaiety? 


Tue Ertuics or ATHEISM 69 


Is it not, rather, a thing to be said with tears, 
as the saddest thing in the world?” Professor 
Clifford, after he had broken definitely with 
Christian faith, yet recognized the wreck athe- 
ism makes of the universe. He pictures himself 
amid the glory of a spring sunrise, gazing 
on the empty heaven stretched over a soulless 
earth, and realizing with a sense of utter lone- 
liness that “the Great Companion was dead.” 

A serious thinker, who felt himself compelled 
by force of logic to hold this creed, ought to 
hope that he might be mistaken; ought to long 
to be refuted. Henry Rogers, indeed, says that 
he “ought to conceal his belief as if it were 
a guilty secret, and to dread making proselytes 
as men refrain from exhibiting their infectious 
sores, or their plague-tainted garments in the 
eyes of the world.” 

Atheism, as thus pictured, is, then, one of the 
inevitable alternatives to Christian faith. Now, 
in spite of its hateful qualities, if it came to us 
arrayed in proofs which to the honest mind 
were final, proofs so strong that to reject them 
would be disloyalty to reason, we must consent 


70 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


to itasacreed. Truth is to be accepted, though 
it destroys us. But atheism, it must be insisted, 
is nothing more than an eternally unproved and 
unprovable guess. It is in quarrel with the 
strongest law of the sane intellect. Belief in it 
is intellectually lower than belief in the dead 
gods and scandalous goddesses of heathen 
mythology. 

And let the two great opposites be put side 
by side. Here is the Christian faith in God, 
with its far-stretching evidences, its pure 
ethics, its sane interpretation of the universe, 
its unbroken procession of saints, its hopes that 
have the energy of creative forces. It is a faith 
which visibly makes for the happiness of the 
world. Beside this lofty figure, as an alterna- 
tive, stands atheism: a guess, a negation, a 
creed without a proof, black with gloom, over- 
shadowed with tremendous risks; a faith which 
has no restraint for sin, and no law for the 
conscience. It is a belief which must leave the 
race bankrupt alike in ethics and in hope. 

The choice betwixt theism and atheism is the 
choice betwixt an archangel and—Caliban! 


CHAPTER III # 


AGNOSTICISM 


We must replace the veil which Paul tore aside two thou- 
sand years ago. . . . We must go back to the cult of the 
Unknown God.—JosepH McCase, in the Agnostic Annual. 


The prevailing man of the future, like many of the saner 
men of today, will presume to no knowledge whatever, will 
presume to no possibility of knowledge, of the real being of 
God.—H. G. WELLS, in Anticipations. 


Agnosticism is but atheism writ respectable-—Dr. AVELING. 


Agnosticism seems, at first sight, to be 
parted from atheism by a very wide interval. 
Tt does not set out with an audacious and in- 
finite negative. The assertion that the world 
has no cause, or is its own cause, 1s an excur- 
sion into the realms of unreason in which the 
agnostic bluntly declines to accompany the 
atheist. Huxley himself attenuate’s agnostt- 
cism into what is nothing else than a definition 
of honesty. “It simply means that a man shall 
not say he knows or believes what he has no 


scientific ground for professing to know or be- 
71 


ey Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


lieve.” In that sense every honest man must 
be an agnostic. 

Asa matter of fact, agnosticism starts from 
the same point as Christianity. It declares that 
the universe is an effect, with an infinite and 
eternal Cause behind it. ‘The consciousness 
of cause,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer, “can be 
abolished only by abolishing consciousness it- 
self.” So the agnostic theory begins not with 
a doubt, still less with a denial, but with a true 
and positive faith. The throne of the universe, 
it affirms, is not empty. There sits upon it an 
eternal Energy from which all things proceed. 
This infinite and eternal Energy—taking 
Spencer as the interpreter of agnosticism—is 
the Ultimate Reality. Its existence is “‘a neces- 
sary datum of consciousness,’ and doubt about 
it is to be dismissed as an act of treason against 
the laws of thought themselves. “Among all 
the beliefs possible to the human mind this,” 
says Herbert Spencer, “has the highest validity 
of any.”? How, then, can agnosticism be de- 
scribed as “atheism writ respectable” ? 


1 First Principles, stereotyped edit., p. 98. 


AGNOSTICISM | a 


But the agnosticism discussed here, it must 
be remembered, is not that distressed mood of 
doubt, which haunts some tender souls; the 
hesitation of a sensitive conscience, which will 
not say it is sure while a single flaw in the 
argument remains. The popular form of 
agnosticism is not a doubt; it is a creed—con- 
vinced, militant, triumphant! It is a nescience 
which talks in more confident accents than 
science itself dares to employ; and it springs 
from a philosophy that blots out not merely the 
distant heavens but much nearer and more 
familiar landscapes. 

The kinship of this type of agnosticism to 
atheism becomes evident at what may be called 
the second stage of its logic. It begins, as we 
have seen, by proclaiming the existence of a 
First Cause. It affirms, on the authority of the 
laws of thought themselves, that he—or it— 
exists, and is, in fact, the One Reality of the 
universe. It then, with a little spray of meta- 
physics—a few passes of debating society logic 
—dismisses this one Reality out of the kingdom 
not only of worship, but of knowledge, and 


74 Tue BeLrers oF UNBELIEF 


therefore of consideration. It cancels it as a 
force affecting conduct. It may be the Supreme 
Cause of everything else; but in the practical 
business of human life it is the cause of noth- 
ing. It is essentially and eternally the Un- 
knowable; and the Unknowable, in the real 
business of life, is the nonexistent. 

Some of the more belligerent agnostics, in- 
deed, declare, not only that we cannot know the 
Ultimate Cause of our existence but that there 
is no reason why we should want to know it. 
“Why should we wish to know?” asks the 
author of Mr. Balfour’s Apologetics. “What 
is God?” he demands again, in a key of scorn. 
“The word represents a phantom, born of 
man’s ignorance and fear.” 

Now, we have only to look at dogmatic ag- 
nosticism as one of the two practical alterna- 
tives to Christian faith, and a whole procession 
of incredibilities instantly make their appear- 
ance. Some belong to what may be called the 
moral order. 

Tried by the test of the black, incredible 
shadow it casts on the entire landscape of 


AGNOSTICISM ras 


human life, agnosticism is not merely as hate- 
ful as atheism; it is more hateful, and this by 
almost measureless degrees. Atheism declares: 
“The heavens are empty.. There is no God. 
We are orphans.” Here is a creed of tears! 
But orphanage, after all, is not the worst of 
lots. An unseen father may be loved. A dead 
father may be a tender and kindling memory. 
But agnosticism bids us see, sitting at the 
crown of the universe, a Figure shrouded in a 
mist through which breaks no gleam of light. 
He—or it—hidden in the heart of that dark- 
ness is the Father of our spirits. He could give 
us the revelation of himself. Nay, he has so 
made us that the desire to know him is part of 
our very nature. How deep and indestructible 
is desire in us for that knowledge is written on 
every page of history. The temples and altars 
of every age and every land are its witnesses. 
All human literature reflects it. 
__ But he who put that impulse in us placed it 
there that he might jest with it. He hides 
himself from his offspring. He has put, as if 
in mockery, the instinct of worship within us; 


76 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


he has made it the purest force in our nature, 
the root of a thousand noble things. Yet it is 
an instinct that lies! It has been created only 
to be cheated. 

There is no other example in nature of an 
organ left without an answering element and 
use. All that we know of the method of nature 
makes it incredible that the eye could come into 
existence if no light waited for it, to be its 
servant, and the field for its exercise. But on 
the agnostic theory the profoundest instinct in 
our spiritual nature is that cruel and bewilder- 
ing paradox, a faculty without a use; an eye 
set in a kingdom of darkness! 

And reason, it may be added, has this to say 
of religion. It represents exactly what, if God 
does exist, ought to be our mood toward him. 
He is our Maker. Our spirit takes its life from 
the breath of his lips. His bounty feeds us. 
His works delight us. The highest exercise of 
our intelligence is, in Kepler’s words, “‘to think 
his thoughts after him.” That we should love 
him is surely the first impulse and the highest 
expression of duty. It is the one supremely 


AGNOSTICISM iy; 


rational mood of the soul. To be like him ought 
to be the sleepless aspiration of the spirit that 
comes from him. “Make me beautiful within,” 
was, Plato tells us, his highest prayer to God. 
But only the thought and presence of God can 
make the inner nature beautiful. 

Yet this, the highest mood of our nature, 
which has on its side the utmost warrant of 
reason, is, on the agnostic theory, the most 
complete delusion! It is nothing more than a 
mockery; a lie, set in the high places of the 
human soul, and set there by the hand that 
made the soul, for all knowledge of God is 
eternally and essentially impossible. What in- 
credibility can be more stupendous than this! 

And, strange to say, this instinct in us which 
turns toward God, and which agnosticism de- 
clares to be eternally predoomed to defeat, is 
visibly the root of the best things in human 
life. What heroisms it inspires! What chari- 
ties leap into existence at its touch! What 
saints it has begotten! What a literature it 
has created! And we are asked to believe that 
behind the heroisms of uncounted martyrs, be- 


78 Tur BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


hind the hymns of worshiping multitudes, the 
prayers of little children, the hopes of dying 
saints, is—a mockery. Religion is nothing but 
an illusion! 

This, surely, is one of the most incredible 
statements ever offered to the human mind. 
“Even as an illusion,” says Professor Gwatkin, 
“the belief has to be accounted for; and if it 
is an illusion, it is beyond comparison the 
mightiest of human illusions. This illusion has 
been the greatest nation-making, nation-bind- 
ing, nation-breaking power in history, the 
great guiding, lifting, transfiguring power of 
human life. This illusion has not only nerved 
men, and even tender women, to face a cross of 
shame before the world, but given them the 
higher courage, and still higher patience, 
needed for the obscure and hopeless toil of 
continual failure in the work seemed appointed 
them. If the greatest force of history and life 
_is an illusion, can we trust even the reasoning 
which professes to prove it so?””* 

But the antecedent incredibilities of agnos- 


1The Knowledge of God, vol. i, p. 116. 


AGNOSTICISM 79 


ticism on the moral side grow as we meditate 
on them. If the best thing in us is the most 
false, the Unknowable Cause of our lives in- 
tended it to be so. He planted in us that loftiest 
impulse of which the human soul is conscious 
—the aspiration after himself—only that he 
might mock it. This is a creed which makes 
the veil on the face of “the Infinite and Eternal 
Energy from which all things proceed” a mask 
which hides the grinning face of a devil! 

Yet if the Unknowable intended to conceal 
himself, and to remain always for us, his 
creatures, an unguessed Riddle, he has some- 
how failed in that strange purpose. The great 
secret has not been kept. We have found out 
enough about the Undiscoverable to kindle a 
quenchless interest! We talk of him, speculate 
about him, build temples to him, sprinkle the 
landscape with churches to his honor. The 
very air of the world is shaken with hymns to 
his praise. A whole literature has been created 
by discussion about him. And on the agnostic 
theory the Unknown Cause of all things must 
have meant this to happen. He must have in- 


80 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


tended that, while the discovery that he is for 
ever Unknowable should be reserved for a lit- 
tle committee of philosophers, an overwhelming 
majority of the human race were to be per- 
suaded, not only that God could be known, but 
that they knew him; that they possessed a reve- 
lation of his will; that love was possible not 
only from God to them, but from them to God. 

The Ultimate Reality, in a word, is a riddle 
which can never be guessed; but the human 
soul has been so planned by its Maker that it 
cannot escape spending its utmost energies in 
the exercise of trying to guess the Unguess- 
able. What a cruel jest is human nature if this 
be the case! And the sly Jester who planned it 
for his own entertainment is—the Father of 
our spirits! On this theory man is, in Tenny- 
son’s bitter words—and in a deeper sense than 
Tennyson meant— 


. a monster then, a dream: 
A discord. Dragons of the prime 
That tear each other in their slime, 
Were mellow music matched with him. 


Agnosticism, it is clear, is a creed discredited 


AGNOSTICISM Sr 


in advance by stupendous moral incredibilities. 
It is a creed to be hated, since it implies that the 
Unknown Cause which made us has toward us 
a mood of scorn. But it is also a creed as dan- 
gerous as it is hateful. Its logic leaves—or 
in the long run must leave—morality wrecked. 
For it robs right of all divine sanction, and 
wrong of all inevitable penality, as completely 
as does atheism. 

It is true, and is most gladly admitted, that 
many agnostics are upright and honorable men, 
with a high standard of personal morality. 
They keep, as a personal possession, the ethics 
of Christianity, while rejecting the roots from 
which those ethics spring. But it is the second 
generation which tests the morality of a creed. 
And the question to be considered is: What 
would be the moral state of the world if every 
other faith perished, and agnosticism became 
the one creed of the race? 

No divine law of right or wrong could, in 
that case, be recognized. Men would have no 
vision of an Eternal Justice linking conse- 
quences to acts, and judging all men by its own 


82 TuE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


august standard. No one, on the agnostic 
theory, can so much as guess what is the will 
of the unknown Cause behind the veil of phe- 
nomena. Does that hidden Cause love truth 
and hate lies? Will he—or it—punish lust and 
reward love? No one can tell. 

Herbert Spencer, the most philosophic brain 
ever devoted to the exposition and defense of 
agnosticism, protests, it will be remembered, 
almost with a touch of irritation, that he has 
no concern about morals. He believed that a 
certain element of mystery, which may dis- 
charge some of the offices of religion, will re- 
main when religion itself has perished. But he 
warns us: “I am not concerned to show what 
effect religious sentiment, as hereafter thus 
modified, will have as a moral agent.” “Will 
it make good men and women?” Mr. Herbert 
Spencer says that he has “not argued, and is 
not bound to argue, that it will do this.” “Will 
it answer the purposes of religion?” “TI have 
said nothing,” he protests, “about its adequacy 
or inadequacy.””* 


1 Nineteenth Century, No. 82, p. 85. 


AGNOSTICISM 83 


But as to its inadequacy who can doubt? 
The rare and fine spirits of our race, touched 
by what is rarest and finest in the atmosphere 
about them, might keep a high standard of 
morality even when agnosticism became uni- 
versal, and all hope of any knowledge of God 
had perished. But what of their children—the 
generations brought up in a dreadful vacuum 
where knowledge of God is not? And what of 
the drunkard and the savage? 

For them agnosticism has neither law nor 
restraint. In the words of Mr. Justice Stephen, 
“it can neither hang them nor damn them; 
how, then, can it hope to govern them?” And 
the problem of all creeds, it must be remem- 
bered, lies in the message it has for the crowd; 
for the defeated, that is; for the wrecked; for 
the moral failures of the race. 

For agnosticism, as for atheism, morality 
must be built on social utility. Goodness is to 
find its motive, and its driving force, in the 
consideration, put brutal, that it will “pay.” 
But if anyone thinks that sin will pay, or is 
willing to run the risk of its not paying, for 


84 Ture Be.iers OF UNBELIEF 


him agnosticism has neither restraint nor 
warning. The agnostic is not able to say, 
finally, and with a certainty that has its roots 
in the very frame of the universe, that lying, 
lust, hate are everywhere and always wrong; 
that if they seem to succeed, it is only for a 
time. If they succeed, they are right! If mur- 
der is useful—if it is only not found out—for 
anything that agnosticism can teach, it is be- 
yond blame. When all morality is resolved 
into the question of utility, essential morality 
itself has evaporated. And a creed equipped 
with such ethics must, when it comes to its 
natural kingdom—when it has finally captured 
the imagination of the world—let loose disrup- 
tive forces that will wreck society. 

Here, then, is a creed antecedently incredible, 
and essentially hateful; yet if it can be proved 
to be true, what remains for us all but to ac- 
cept it? Shall we cling to a lie because it is 
fair; or quarrel with truth for no better than 
cesthetic reasons? But where is the tremen- 
dous energy of logic needed to accredit to rea- 
son a creed burdened with such results ? 


CEAP PERL, 


Tue CAasE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 


The first Cause of a Cosmos to be an adequate cause and 
deserve the name, must be a Supreme Intelligence-——W arp, 
Agnosticism, vol. ii, p. 269. 


The logic of agnosticism, stich as it is, may 
be expressed almost in a phrase. It does not 
consist of any reasoned induction, gathered 
over a wide area of facts. Its strength does 
not lie in any destructive analysis of the evi- 
dences of Christianity. It consists in the al- 
leged discovery of a metaphysical impossibility 
—an impossibility constituted by the very na- 
ture of the human mind—that God can come 
within the area of our knowledge. Such knowl- 
edge is discovered to be intrinsically and eter- 
nally impossible. It is made incredible by the 
very nature of knowledge itself. It has not 
arrived, because it could not! 

About this alleged impossibility of possess- 


ing any knowledge of God some things are 
85 


86 THE BELIEFS OF- UNBELIEF 


clear at a glance. The first is that all the pre- 
sumptions are against it. Professor Gwatkin 
puts this with a touch of dry humor which in- 
tensifies the strength of his argument. “If 
there is a God,” he says, “a personal Being 
above us, and not below us, I think we may 
take it as possible that he may have something 
to reveal; and then, if he is able to reveal it, if 
he may be supposed willing to do so, and if 
man is able to receive it—on these four con- 
ditions revelation is possible.’”* 

Which of those four conditions is so much 
as doubtful? It is certainly not the possibility 
that “God may have something to reveal.” As 
little can it be that he is able to reveal it. The 
beasts can speak to us; is God lower than 
they? To doubt whether he is willing to make 
a revelation is to impeach his goodness. The 
only remaining doubt is whether man is able 
to receive stich a revelation. 

But as to this, let it be noticed that agnosti- 
cism itself is built on a paradox. It commits 
suicide in the act of defining itself. For this 


1The Knowledge of God, vol. i, p. 6. 


THE CasE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 87 


denial of the possibility of knowing anything 
about God is based on the amount of knowledge 
we do possess about him! How much we must 
know about God before we are entitled to an- 
nounce, with absolute certainty, that all knowl- 
edge of him is beyond the reach of our intellect! 

Huxley invented the term “agnosticism,” 
but Herbert Spencer has supplied it with a 
philosophy; and we have only to recite the 
titles by which Spencer describes what he calls 
“the Unknowable” to see what an amount of 
knowledge is connoted by them. The Unknow- 
able is “that Ultimate Existence which was 
manifested in infinitely varied ways before hu- 
manity arose.” Surely, an Unknown which is 
“manifested” becomes, in part at least, the 
Known in the very process of “manifestation.” 
The Unknowable, again, is “that great stream 
of creative power, unlimited in space and time, 
of which humanity is a transitory product.” 
“A stream of creative power’’—this is a con- 
ception as definite, and as surely connoting 
knowledge, as the great affrmation of Scrip- 
ture, “God is a Spirit.””, The Unknowable, says 


88 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Spencer, is the All-being, the Ultimate Reality; 
“the same power which in ourselves wells up 


1 This proces- 


in the form of consciousness.” 
sion of titles certainly presupposes a very large 
area of knowledge. Can that Power about 
which so much is known, and known so posi- 
tively, be honestly described as “Unknown’’? 

But the assertion that God is unknowable, 
it will be found, is extracted from a definition 
of knowledge which begs the whole question, 
and about which only one thing has to be stated 
in order to show that it means something else 
than it seems to mean, and is, in fact, little else 
than a trick with words. It is a definition 
which proves that not only is the Ultimate 
Cause of all things unknowable, but so are a 
hundred other things that lie within the reach 
of our senses, thing's which constitute the whole 
machinery of practical life, and with which we 
deal every moment of our lives. 

Herbert Spencer introduces us to a vast pro- 
cession of “unknowables.” “Space,” he says, 
‘is unknowable; so is matter, so is mind. 


1 Nineteenth Century, No. 89, p. 5. 


THE Case AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 8g 


Force stands in the category of things beyond 
the possibility of knowledge. So does motion. 
The earth is unknowable; we ourselves are un- 
knowable even by ourselves.” The solar sys- 
tem is “an utterly inconceivable object,” a state- 
ment which, taken literally, reduces astronomy, 
as a science, to bankruptcy. We may imagine 
we know something about such a familiar ex- 
ercise as walking; but Mr. Herbert Spencer 
assures us that “it is impossible to conceive of 
rest becoming motion or motion rest.” And 
yet we walk! 

Mr. Herbert Spencer’s logic is equally con- 
fident, and equally triumphant, at all these 
points. And, under the spell of his argument, 
a limitless continent of the unknown spreads 
about us, and stretches from our very toes to 
the horizon. After proving that “the ultimate 
unit of matter must remain absolutely un- 
known,” that “position in space is inconceiv- 
able,” that “motion is truly not cognizable,” 
Spencer concludes by making the soul of man 
himself the most hopeless of all unknowables. 
“The personality of which each is conscious, 


go THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


and of which the existence is, to each, a fact 
beyond all others most certain, is yet a thing 
which cannot be truly known at all. Knowl- 
edge of it is forbidden by the very nature of 
thought.” 

This ought to be impressive, since it is “the 
very nature of thought” which forbids us to 
know ourselves. But then Mr. Spencer goes 
on to say “the very nature of thought is itself 
unknown’’; and how one unknown thing can 
explain and prove another equally unknown 
can be clear only to a philosopher. 

Mr. Spencer’s logic at this point may be 
briefly stated. Knowledge, he says, implies (1) 
something known, (2) someone or something 
that knows it. Here is the famous resolution 
of knowledge into the antithesis of subject and 
object. How can the soul know itself? If the 
object known is self, what is the subject which 
knows it? Are there two selves? The knowl- 
edge of oneself means a state in which the ob- 
ject known and the subject which knows it are 
one, and this means the annihilation of both 


1 First Principles, par. 20. 


THE CASE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM QI 


subject and object, which, to quote Euclid, “is 
absurd.” So we get Mr. Spencer’s conclusion 
that knowledge of ourselves is forbidden by the 
very nature of knowledge. 

Professor Momerie, it will be remembered, 
cleverly applies logic, by which Mr. Spencer 
thinks he proves that self-knowledge is impos- 
sible to self-love. Certainly the fundamental 
condition of all love is the antithesis of subject 
and object. In love there is an object loved and 
the subject that loves. To say that a man loves 
himself is the assertion that subject and object 
are identical; but this is, on Mr. Spencer’s 
logic, impossible. Therefore no man can any 
more love himself than he can know himself. 
And yet the biggest fact in human life is exactly 
that self-love which, on Mr. Spencer’s logic, 
can never exist. 

“Personality,” says Mr. Spencer, “is the fact 
beyond all others the most certain’; yet, to 
quote Professor Momerie, “the fact which 
stands first in order of certainty Mr. Spencer 
will not allow to stand even last in the order 
of knowledge.” He declares, in regard to it, 


92 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


we are and must ever remain completely igno- 
rant. Spencer’s laws of thought, in a word, go 
to prove that we are sure of what is somewhat 
doubtful, but are not sure of that in regard to 
which there can be no doubt. What a paradox 
is this philosophy which describes beliefs of in- 
ferior validity as knowledge, and that which 
has the highest possible validity as ignorance! 
To the practical reason it will seem unneces- 
sary to consider too anxiously a definition of 
knowledge which lands us in such remarkable 
conclusions. Knowledge, Mr. Spencer goes on 
to say, can only come by comparison. There 
must be two or more things to be compared be- 
fore knowledge is possible. Whatever cannot 
be referred to a class is unknowable. Now, as 
there cannot be two Ultimate Causes to be com- 
pared, knowledge at this point must be pro- 
nounced unattainable. It is hardly a burlesque 
to say that, by the same logic, if there were only 
one baby in the world it, too, would be unknow- 
able to its own mother until a little brother or 
sister arrived to make comparisons possible. 
To be known, again, according to Mr. Spen- 


THE CasE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 93 


cer, “a thing must be conceived as having attri- 
butes.”* But since such things as space, time, 
motion, God, have no attributes, they are for- 
ever unknowable, etc. 

This definition of knowledge is, obviously, a 
torpedo which blows up many other things than 
religion. It shatters science. For what can 
science teach if time, space, motion, matter, the 
earth, the solar system, are all dismissed into 
the realms of the essentially and eternally un- 
knowabler The same logic which proves that 
the soul can never know God proves a man can- 
not know himself. We are invited, in a word, 
to believe that there is no intermediate stage 
betwixt omniscience and universal and eternal 
ignorance. We can know nothing if we do not 
know everything. 

A plain man will reply that Mr. Spencer’s 
logic works both ways. We are assured that, 
in a metaphysical sense, we cannot “know” 
God; and in exactly the same sense we cannot 
know time, space, matter, motion, the solar 
system, the earth, or our own souls. But we 


1 First Principles, par. 13. 


94 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


certainly know enough about these latter “un- 
knowables’’ to use them as forces for the ends 
we choose. We build life and science on them; 
and life and science are realities. We win or 
miss happiness in their use; and happiness is 
notadream. And if God is only “unknowable” 
in the sense in which they are, we may know 
enough of him to color life, and create a moral- 
ity; enough for duty, for worship, for love. We 
can, under such conditions, cheerfully leave 
philosophers to wrangle over the metaphysics 
of knowledge. 

But another line of thought has to be con- 
sidered. It is certain that, somehow, a knowl- 
edge of that Unknown Power does exist—a 
knowledge sufficient to create a literature, to 
inspire a worship, to deflect the history of the 
world. The very starting point of agnosticism, 
indeed, the affirmation that the Cause of all 
things exists, is an assertion of knowledge. 
We cannot conceive of its existence except we 
know something about it. “The Unknowable,” 
says Professor Gwatkin, “is the Unthinkable.” 

Herbert Spencer himself, in the name of ag- 


THE Case AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 95 


nosticism, does a great deal of thinking about 
“the Unthinkable.” This Unascertained Some- 
what, or Something, behind all phenomena, he 
says, is “the Ultimate Cause of all things.” 
Now, it is a postulate of the natural reason 
that there must be some relation betwixt a 
cause and its effect. Science itself is built on 
that postulate, and would perish if it were dis- 
proved. 

This Unknowable Cause must, for one thing, 
possess power sufficient to produce the effects 
of which it is the cause. So the visible universe 
is a witness to the fact that the Unknowable 
is the Almighty. As the system of nature is a 
unit, it must be the product of a single cause. 
So the Unknowable, we are sure, is One. 

Nature, too, is built on plan. All science 
proceeds on this assumption, and would be 
impossible if it were denied. Therefore it is 
certain that the Unknowable acts on method. 
The visible universe is stained to its minutest 
atom with the characteristics of design. It is 
penetrated through and through with thought, 
or we could not think about it. And how can 


96 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


we have intelligibility in the result without in- 
telligence in the cause? 

The existence of general laws does not dis- 
prove design; they are an expression of it; they 
act as its servants. The “laws of nature” are 
only names for discovered uniformities and 
coexistences, and successions in phenomena. 
Even if these laws can be expressed in me- 
chanical formule, the formule must have de- 
sign behind them, and be its manifestations. 
Purpose in nature can only be denied by assum- 
ing with Comte that sequences, because they 
are regular, cannot have an intelligent cause. 
‘A disorderly system of nature would require a 
supernatural explanation, but an orderly system 
requires none. Professor Momerie’s answer iS 
final: “Purpose is none the less purpose be- 
cause it is unchangeable. Knowledge is none 
the less knowledge because it is complete. Will 
is none the less will because it is unconquerable. 
Thought is none the less thought because it 
embraces the entire universe at once.” 

Now, design means a reasoned end, and the 
choice of fit means to reach that end. The 


THE CASE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 97 


universe, in a word, is built on reason and 
shaped by purpose; and this proves the exist- 
ence of reason and will in its Unknowable 
Cause. Reason and will, again, are the char- 
acteristics of personality, so the Unknowable 
isa Person. Even Haeckel, who resolves “the 
ultimate cause of all phenomena” into “an ex- 
tremely attenuated, elastic, and light jelly,” yet 
finds it necessary to endow this primal jelly 
with ‘“‘sensation and will; though,” he adds, on 
reflection, “naturally of the lowest grade.” 
How this mysterious jelly from which the uni- 
verse has sprung, can bestow on us “‘sensation 
and will’ of a higher grade than it possesses 
itself is not clear; but sensation and will are 
certainly qualities of personality. 

Thus, by a logic as absolute as the laws of 
thought themselves, we can read in the visible 
phenomena about us proofs that their Cause 
possesses infinite power and wisdom, that he— 
or it—chooses reasoned ends, and reaches them 
by fit means; that it is possessed of reason and 
will, and so is a Person. 

Herbert Spencer, indeed, goes on to say, in 


98 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


express terms, that “the Power manifested 
throughout the universe, distinguished as ma- 
terial, is the same Power which in ourselves 
wells up in the form of consciousness.” If this 
be true, that Power must possess consciousness, 
or it lacks what it has given us. In his auto- 
biography Spencer tells us there have been mo- 
ments in his experience when, meditating on 
the amazing universe, he almost forgot his own 
metaphysics; and “the thought,” he says, “that 
consciousness in some rudimentary form is 
omnipresent was borne in upon me.” But 
consciousness 1s the sure mark of personality. 

It may be added that what makes science 
possible is something more than the mere ob- 
served succession of phenomena. It is an ele- 
ment of what may be called trustworthiness in 
nature; a trustworthiness which runs back to 
a spiritual root. Why is yesterday a pledge of 
tomorrow? Science is built on the belief that 
what has happened once will, under the same 
conditions, infallibly happen again. To doubt 
this would be the wreck of all knowledge. Yet 
we have no guarantee for the great uniformi- 


THE Case AGAINST AGNOSTICISM — gg 


ties of nature, except in the assumption of 
Something behind nature, of whose fidelity—to 
borrow a moral term—they are the reflection. 

The fidelities of physical nature are but the 
expression in physical terms of the fidelity of 
God. “A physical universe that is spiritually 
and morally trustworthy at the root,” is, in the 
words of Professor Campbell Fraser, the one 
condition that makes physical science possible. 
So we get in physical science itself the revela- 
tion of a moral quality in the Cause behind all 
phenomena; and this, too, brings that Cause 
within the area of the Known. 

At the point where the revelation of lower 
phenomena ends another line of revelation be- 
gins. Man is part of a system of things. He 
is “‘the last work” of the Ultimate Cause; he is 
its highest work. And if the character of the 
Ultimate Cause is revealed in the lower forms 
of nature, it must find still clearer manifesta- 
tion in this, its loftiest form. 

On what plan has the Ultimate Cause built 
the soul of man? By the witness of his own 
consciousness—and this, for him, is the ulti- 


i cele) Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


mate certainty—man knows that he is a free 
spirit. He moves among the forces of nature, 
with power to use them as his tools; to set them 
in new combinations, and produce results of 
which they themselves are incapable. 

Moreover, the central thing in him is char- 
acter, and character is more than the sum total 
of habits. It has a moral root. Conscience is 
its shaping force. Its culminating point 1S 
reached when will and conscience move to- 
gether in unbroken rhythm. 

Now, He who gave us these things must 
himself possess them; or He—or It—is lower 
than we are. Could That which is pitiless, en- 
dow us with pity? Could That which is itself 
loveless, set our natures in key with the music 
of love? The Ultimate Cause which has set 
that sublime thing we call conscience in human 
nature must itself be a moral agent, or it has 
bestowed on us a loftier gift than is to be found 
in its own nature. 

If we reflect, again, we find there is wrought 
into the very fibers of man’s nature a mystic, 
resistless, universal Something which makes it 


THe Case AGAINST AGNOSTICISM tI1o1 


answer to the call of goodness and recoils in 
the presence of great wickedness. In the lower 
forms of life there is the strange thing we call 
instinct. It is not reason. It reaches its end 
by processes swifter than reason knows. What 
science can explain that impulse which makes 
the bee build its hexagonal cell, or that teaches 
the bird, born under northern skies, to wing 
its swift, unguided flight southward, across 
trackless leagues of land and sea, to warmer 
climates ? 

And there is a mysterious force in us, link- 
ing us to the moral realm, which corresponds 
to that strange power in the lower animals. 
“Instinct,” says Professor Gwatkin, “seems a 
deeper mystery than intellect, and may be more 
nearly connected with the final secret of life. 
It comes up from unknown depths, and some- 
how it comes up true.” In exactly the same 
way certain moral instincts lie hid in man’s 
soul that science cannot explain, but which ex- 
ist, and, in Professor Gwatkin’s words, “they 
come up true.” 

These are the central qualities of man’s na- 


102 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


ture—will, conscience, personality; the power 
to love; a cluster of imperishable moral in- 
stincts. Now, we are sure—unless reason be- 
trays us—that the Cause which registers itself 
in these effects must have something that cor- 
responds to them. How, then, can it be de- 
scribed as Unknown, still more as Unknow- 
able? 

And if the individual human life is a revela- 
tion of the nature of the Cause from which it 
springs, history—the life of the race—is yet 
another revelation. For we are sure it is an 
evolution; a process shaped by definite forces: 
an Epic moving toward a definite goal, which 
the Force behind history has chosen. 

The revelation of the Cause behind all phe- 
nomena thus given by nature, and man, and 
history, is not perfect. It is the broken arc of 
a circle, a sheaf of splintered rays streaming 
through imperfect media, the twin, ascending 
curve of an uncompleted arch. The arch needs 
its keystone, the splintered light the clear me- 
dium, the broken circle the completing segment. 
And this, Christian faith declares, is to be 


THE CasE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 103 


found in a written revelation, or in an Incarna- 
tion. But this is another line of thought, and 
need not be discussed here. 

The facts we have recited are plain and 
unchallengeable; they constitute a chain of 
proofs in which there is not a broken link, that 
a revelation of the nature of the Ultimate Cause 
is given in the system of things about us. The 
logic proceeds on the supposition that the acts 
of an agent are an interpretation of character. 
Weare sure of nothing if not of this. It is the 
law by which we judge each other. Does it 
fail when applied to God? What should we 
say of a science that asked us to believe that 
the spectroscope is a sure guide as far as 
the light of the smaller planets is concerned, 
but becomes unreliable when applied to 
the sun! Science knows no such breach in 
the continuity of law throughout the whole 
universe. 

Now, the admission of the argument thus 
stated is fatal to agnosticism, for it proves that 
what it dismisses as the Unknowable is actually 
known. But the denial of the argument is 


104 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


equally ruinous to the agnostic. It is certain 
that the Ultimate Cause has put in the human 
mind the instinct, the intellectual necessity, 
which compels that mind to read the nature of 
a cause in the character of its effects. That 
impulse is not born of chance; it is part of the 
system of things. And if it is not trustworthy, 
then it is planned to deceive! The Ultimate 
Cause has set a lie in the high places of the 
human intelligence, and given it empire over 
that intelligence. 

But this, too, it must be insisted, is a reve- 
lation of the character of that Unascertained 
Something which is behind all phenomena, a 
revelation of its purpose, of the instruments 
it uses, of the end toward which it works. So 
that Unascertained Something comes within 
the area of our knowledge even on this theory, 
and by that very fact is a disproof of agnosti- 
cism. The Unknowable stands to this extent, 
at least, in the category of the Known. 

But how dreadful is the knowledge! It is 
not Good, but Evil, that planned the world. 
And yet, strange to say, this Unknown Power 


THE CasE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 105 


which has enacted a lie, and set it in authority 
over the human intellect, has also planted in 
man’s nature the instinct which condemns lying 
and counts truth noble and sacred! 


COLA RAG Rave 


THE PARADOX OF AGNOSTICISM 


The agnostic’s position is as if Euclid worked out his demon- 
stration complete, and then turned round of a sudden to dis- 
pute the Q.E.D. He is not reasoning, but simply refusing to 
reason.—GwaTKIN, The Knowledge of God, vol. i, p. 15. 


The whole system of our belief as to the intrinsic reasonable- 
ness of conduct must fall without a hypothesis unverifiable by 
experience reconciling the individual with the Universal Rea- 
son, without a belief, in some form or other, that the moral 
order which we see imperfectly realized in this actual world 
is yet actually perfect. If we reject this belief, . .. the cos- 
mos of duty is reduced to a chaos, and the prolonged effort 
of the human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational 
conduct is seen to have been predoomed to inevitable failure. 
—Srpewick, Method of Ethics. 


No attempt is made in these chapters to give 
more than the briefest hints of the case against 
agnosticism; hints which might easily be drawn 
out into a volume. But let this brief outline be 
summed up in a few sentences. 

Agnosticism affirms an ignorance too spa- 
cious to be credible; an ignorance so wide, in- 


deed, that, if it really exists, it destroys science 
106 


THE PARADOX OF AGNOSTICISM 107 


as well as religion. It casts an eclipse on this 
world as deep and black as on the next. It 
affirms that we know nothing, and can know 
nothing, not only of the Ultimate Cause of 
things, but of ourselves, and of the things we 
handle as tools every day. 

Time, as we have seen, is one unknown; 
space is another; the solar system is a third; 
we ourselves are unknown to ourselves. A 
cobweb of metaphysics is spun that shuts out 
not only the sun at noonday, and the stars that 
burn in the nightly heavens, but even the 
familiar lights and landscapes of earth. Noth- 
ing but the foolish awe of unmeaning words— 
the cowardly dread of great names—forbids us 
to treat the whole philosophy of the unknown 
as a jest. 

It must be remembered that Darwin himself 
was not a Spencerian. “Such parts of Spencer 
as I have read with care,” he says, “impressed 
my mind with the idea of his inexhaustible 
wealth of suggestion, but never convinced 
me!?! And in that fine and powerful book, 


1 Life and Letters, vol. iii, p. 194. 


108 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Naturalism and Agnosticism, Professor Ward 
talks of Spencer’s philosophy of agnosticism 
in language of great plainness. “His flimsy 
agnosticism,” he says, “is only saved from be- 
ing utter nonsense” by “the inconsistent im- 
plications and admissions of an idealistic char- 
acter scattered through his writings.” 

How can anyone, indeed, contemplate with- 
out a smile the spectacle of a philosopher sit- 
ting in his study playing a few ingenious tricks 
with logic, and, on the authority of that per- 
formance, giving the lie to the raptures of all 
the saints, and the surest consciousness of the 
highest souls of the race! The answered 
prayers, the realized deliverances, the trans- 
figured lives, the historic reformations of twen- 
ty centuries are dismissed as foolish dreams on 
the strength of a few passes of debating society 
logic. 

And this is only part of the case. About 
nine tenths of agnostic philosophy it may be 
said that, true or false, we must forget it—we 
must agree to act as if it were untrue—the 
moment we step into practical life. We cannot 


THE PARADOX OF AGNOSTICISM 109g 


mention it in the open air, or try to act on it 
in the hurry of daily affairs, without making 
ourselves ridiculous. We must assume that we 
know force, motion, time, matter, and the solar 
system, or what becomes of science? How 
could we build a bridge, or run a railway, or 
sail a ship if we really knew nothing of these 
things? Even the most convinced agnostic 
must forget that time is unknowable when he 
has to catch a train. 

Why do men so conveniently forget nine 
tenths of the philosophy of agnosticism and 
remember only the final and dreadful tenth— 
that which touches God and blots him out? 
May not the answer be that, in too many cases, 
at least, this philosophy fits in with that un- 
confessed bias of the human heart against God 
on which the Divine Word puts its finger and 
names it sin? 

Agnosticism, on the moral side, is an easy 
creed. It might almost be described as a gen- 
eral agreement about God that nobody shall so 
much as ask what is his will concerning us. 
But on the intellectual side it is nothing better 


IIo THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


than a metaphysical quibble, a humiliation to 
reason, an affront to common sense. 

How profoundly this theory, if it at once 
captured the world and shaped it to its own 
evil image, would affect the ethics of the race 
is clear. It creates a totally new moral land- 
scape. The measureless horizons of eternity 
are gone; there remains only the tiny curve of 
time. Its moral code strikes a baser key than 
even that of atheism. “There is no God! Let 
us act as if there were none!” The logic of 
that dreadful deduction, at least, is flawless. 
“There is a God, but he does not count. Let 
us act as if he did not exist.” That is a con 
clusion that shocks reason as profoundly as it 
disquiets the conscience. 

And let it be remembered that there is no 
such thing as an interregnum in morals. If 
divine law as a rule of conduct is canceled, 
something must step into its place; and it is 
melancholy to recall the attempts which have 
been made from the agnostic side to find a 
substitute for Christian ethics. “TI will at least 
live like a gentleman,” said Leslie Stephen, 


THe PARADOX OF AGNOSTICISM atid 


when he had definitely renounced his Christian 
faith; and he acted on that fine resolve. But 
what about those who are not “gentlemen”? 
What about the wife-beater? What about the 
children of the slums, the savages bred in 
heathenism ? 

Christ can turn icicles into fire; and this is 
the miracle for which the world waits. It 
wants, in other words, a spiritual force which 
can transfigure the brute; which can regenerate 
wild tribes, and transmute into beauty the 
human waste of great cities. And the morality 
which consists in “living like a gentleman” will 
not work these miracles. 

History is rich in what may be called literary 
substitutes for a divine law of conduct: the 
“utility” of John Stuart Mill, the “persistent 
instinct, innate or partly acquired,” of Darwin, 
the test of “conduciveness to happiness” of 
Herbert Spencer, the “utterance of the public 
spirit of the race,” of Leslie Stephen, the “effect 
of social rules enforced by penalty” of Profes- 
sor Bain. And, as restraints of the terrific 
forces of sin, they are all mere cobwebs. 


II2 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


This, then, is the indictment of agnosticism. 
It is intellectually a self-refuted paradox. It 
escapes being dismissed as a jest only because 
nine tenths of its curious philosophy is forgot- 
ten. On the strength of a metaphysical refine- 
ment which proclaims the invalidity of all 
knowledge, and must therefore in practical life 
be forgotten, the great procession of witnesses 
for God—conscience within and nature with- 
out, the written Word, the signature of reli- 
gion on history, the divine figure of Christ— 
all are dismissed as dreams. God himself be- 
comes an infinite, eternal, and omnipotent Ir- 
relevancy in his own universe. 

Oh, daring, dreadful, monstrous creed! And 
we are asked to accept it as the result of an 
analysis of knowledge which, the moment prac- 
tical affairs are touched, even the agnostic him- 
self must dismiss as untrue. What other creed 
requires us to believe so much, and offers us so 
little justification for that belief? 

Theism, it may be frankly admitted, has its 
difficulties—difficulties born of the mystery in: 
evitable when the finite mind strives to conceive 


THE PARADOX OF AGNOSTICISM II3 


the Infinite. But where theism has difficulties 
its alternatives have incredibilities, not to say 
impossibilities. Christian theism, moreover, 1s 
accredited by its ethics. It is the one effective 
system of morals that human history knows. 
Every sane man must wish it to be true. But 
both atheism and agnosticism are discredited 
by their morality, or, rather, by their want of 
morality. If they conquered the world, it would 
only be to destroy it. An impossible creed, in 
each case, is linked to an intolerable morality ; 
and we may say of each that, wherever the 
truth lies, it cannot be here! 

“One should hesitate,” says a French wit, 
“in giving one’s opinion on philosophy when 
we differ from the sages, and on religion when 
we differ from the saints.” But in this debate 
nearly all the sages, and absolutely all the 
saints, are on the side of Christianity! Itisa 
creed which, unless perverted, certainly makes 
for goodness. It keeps the golden chain of the 
saints unbroken. Under every sky today, it 1s 
creating pure lives and inspiring happy deaths. 
“Our Father, which art in heaven”: this is the 


114 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


creed that every good mother finds it sweet to 
teach her child. It is a theology which is born 
of love, and creates love. Its roots run down 
to the heart. Its evidences are writ plain on 
the very face of the universe. They are at- 
tested by history. They are verified afresh in 
human experience with every new day. 

Oh blessed faith! And, hidden under many 
disguises, are its inevitable alternatives: the 
black, tremendous negation of atheism, pan- 
theism, which denies personality to man and 
holiness to God, or the self-created and all- 
including blindness of agnosticism. And be- 
twixt these alternatives, as between eternal op- 
posites, the human soul stands whipped by the 
sharp necessity of action into choice. 

For these rival creeds are not abstract 
theories, as trivial as the colored balls of a jug- 
gler, and, like them, the mere sport of ingenious 
fingers. Each is a formula of conduct. Each 
shapes life. Each is a chart by which the ship 
must sail—is sailing—toward an unseen port. 


Is there, for the sane mind, room for doubt as a 


to which chart should be taken? 


BO) GL 


rire Alen RNA IME Sa LOB RIVET r 
ENG Cer Eos 


t1% 


indauaedh Uh 


rE GE RAS PANG ATR ELOAG Ol 
CERT Sih 


(Cin PAVE TEA Al 


Tur PLACE OF CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN 
CREED 


The religion of Christ goes mysteriously back to his person. 
—KEIM. 


The historical fact of Christ, interpreted by faith, is the 
central secret of the New Testament. It is ...a great new 
Act of God, which constitutes a new world.—Cairns, Chris- 
tianity in the Modern World, p. 149. 


The faith of Christendom finds its center not 
in a book, or a creed, or a philosophy, not in an 
ethical code, or a many-centuried institution, 
but in a Person. It stands or falls with the 
single figure of Jesus Christ; and it is worth 
while to put, in untheological language, the 
general Christian faith about Christ, taking 
what is common to all varieties of Christian 
belief. For if the differences of the Christian 
churches are strange and tragical, their agree- 
ments are fundamental and eternal. 

Jesus Christ, the general faith of Christen- 


dom affirms, is not a far-off figure on the hort- 
ae) 


120 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


zon of history. He is not a creed in an East- 
ern gown, a cluster of dogmas or of legends, 
which have somehow gathered round a tiny 
kernel of truth—nay, which have no kernel of 
fact at their heart, but have crystallized round 
a mere vacuum. He is a living Person, touch- 
ing men today with living hands, and searching 
the depths of men’s personality with living 
force. He trod the earth’s soil once, two thou- 
sand years ago; he shapes its life today. 
Whether Christ once existed might be 
treated as a question of documents and dates, 
a puzzle in archeology, a debate to be settled 
by a jury of antiquarians. Christian faith af- 
firms the historic fact, but it affirms, too, the 
living fact that Christ exists today! This is 
the supreme truth for which Christianity 
stands. So the debate about Christ is to be 
waged not merely in the forum of history but 
of consciousness. And at this point an appeal 
might well be made to Coleridge’s test. “Do 
not talk to me,” said Coleridge, “of the evi- 
dences of Christianity. Try it. It has been 
eighteen hundred years in existence, and no- 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 121 


body who has tried it on its own terms has 
ever challenged it as a failure.” 

But if the question has to be argued as one 
of history, then the general faith of Christen- 
dom declares that Jesus Christ is a Person as 
real as Alexander or Cesar, with a volume of 
evidence as to his character and acts as much 
surer than theirs as his impress on the world 
is infinitely deeper and more enduring. He 
lived, taught, suffered, died, and rose from the 
dead, exactly as described in the New Testa- 
ment. And it is not enough to say that the 
four Gospels are true narratives; it is inade- 
quate to say, even, that the whole New Testa- 
ment is Christ’s biography. All history since 
is his biography. 

The Gospels give the record of the few years 
of his earthly life, and of his teaching, or of as 
much of it as his immediate disciples could com- 
prehend. The other books of the New Testa- 
ment show his impress on the generation that 
immediately followed. The history of the civil- 
ized world since is a record of the effect his 
life has produced on the race. 


~ 


122 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


The Christian Church holds Christ to be the 
one sufficient ethical teacher that mankind 
knows, and after twenty centuries the race still 
sits at his feet. It has found nothing higher ; 
it can imagine nothing higher. Interpreted 
by human philosophy, morality knows only two 
stages: the earliest and rudest, the morality of 
definite rules; later—and loftier—comes the 
morality of principles. But Christ lifts our 
ethics up to a height beyond human philosophy. 
He teaches a morality which is nothing else 
than love in action. Rules, Principles, Love— 
so the scheme of morals is made complete. But 
it is Christ who completes it. 

And Christ gives us this new morality not 
drawn out in a code, but embodied in human 
terms, and linked to a victorious spiritual 
energy. He is the supreme Example, as well 
as the one authoritative Teacher of the race. 
We judge him today by the new conscience he 
has himself created, and so miss one half of his 
unique greatness. Only when he is tried by the 
ethical standards of his own generation can his 
separateness as a moral Teacher be realized. 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 123 


But to say that Christ is the Teacher of the 
race, the one supreme expression of goodness it 
knows, is insufficient. Christ cannot be classed 
with men. He does not sit side by side with 
even Plato or Marcus Aurelius. He is the 
Eternal Word made flesh: the Eternal Word 
dwelling among men, and full of grace and 
truth. His birth was an incarnation. His life 
is not an ascent—the crest of a wave of human 
aspiration. It isa descent. We see, in it, God 
stooping from heaven, not the daring spiritual 
genius of man climbing to heaven. Christ 
touches us with a kinsman’s hands, tender as 
none others ever were, but the hands are those 
that made us. 

Christ, in brief, is more than a Teacher 
about God. He is God: God breaking out of 
the spiritual realm, descending from the awful 
height of his greatness, to resctte the souls he 
has made from overwhelming peril; God tak- 
ing upon himself human nature, that he may 
redeem it. 

So we do not come to Christ for dreams and 
guesses about the First Cause of things. His 


124 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


life is the supreme self-manifestation of the 
personal God. “He that hath seen me’’—it is 
his own witness—“hath seen the Father.” 

And if the birth of Jesus Christ was an in- 
carnation, his death was more than a martyr- 
dom. It was in some mysterious way an expia- 
tion, “a sacrifice for our sins,” to use the words 
of Scripture; a sacrifice with mystery above it, 
mystery beneath it, mystery about it; mystery 
which no theology can measure or express. 

Let there be put side by side Socrates taking 
the cup of hemlock, with a touch of something 
like gaiety, and Christ taking his cup, with 
sweat of blood and mystery of anguish. Plain- 
ly, in Christ’s case there is an element no or- 
dinary human death knows: there are heights 
to which our poor thoughts may not climb, and 
depths for which we have no plummet. But it 
is to Gethsemane, not to Athens, the race turns 
in search of deliverance. Socrates, the Greek, 
has never touched the world’s conscience and 
imagination as Christ, the Jew, has touched it. 

On the human side, as myriads know ex- 
perimentally, from the death of Christ streams 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 125 


a spiritual energy which transfigures the soul 
surrendered to its influence. And in some dim, 
mysterious way, beyond the range of our 
thoughts, we are able to see that on the divine 
side his death was an event which—if only by 
the effect which, as the overwhelming manifes- 
tation of God’s love, it produces on the human 
soul—makes forgiveness possible. But from 
all human speculations we come back to the 
plain words of Scripture for the meaning of 
Christ’s death—words overwhelming in their 
significance when we remember their subject 
is the Eternal Son of God: “H&E DIED For Us.” 

What heights and depths are hidden in those 
four words the human mind cannot guess. And 
this not because God has his own secrets, and 
keeps them, but because here is a deep beyond ° 
our sounding. Yet on the fact thus shrouded 
in mystery, Christian faith—though it must be 
confessed with much dimness and awe—rests 
with unshakable confidence, remembering 
Pascal’s great saying: “The highest act of 
reason is to recognize that there are things 
beyond its range.” 


126 TuE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


And if Christ died as a sacrifice for our sins, 
he rose again from the dead in sign of victory 
over sin, and as pledge of final deliverance from 
both sin and death for every soul that accepts 
him. 

Christ, in a word, is accepted, not merely as 
a Teacher, an Example; He is a Saviour. He 
offers us, not a speculation, but a gospel; not a 
philosophy, but a deliverance. He puts into our 
hands, it is true, a code of perfect ethics; but 
he does vastly more. He touches our spirits 
with a transfiguring moral energy. He not 
only announces the kingdom of God; he creates 
it. The words of the New Testament are coun- 
tersigned by the whole spiritual experience of 
the race: “If any man be in Christ Jesus, he is 
a new creation.” 

Christianity, we repeat, is not a philosophy, 
but it has a philosophy, sublime in its height 
and depth. Are we challenged to say what is 
its innermost meaning? On the Christian 
reading, God is building, afresh, into order and 
beauty, a wrecked spiritual universe. It must, 
by the necessity of things, be shaped by moral 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 127 


forces. It is being built for love’s ends, on 
love’s methods, and by love’s energies. It is 
described in the words of Scripture as “‘the 
kingdom of his dear Son’’; and, being trans- 
lated into it, we become its subjects, live by its 
laws, dwell in its security, and in the climax of 
God’s plans shall share its splendor. | 

Does all this seem a tale incredible, a rose- 
colored myth, a dream of dead and forgotten 
poets, beautiful, no doubt, but vain as it is 
beautiful? There are two things, it may be 
replied, which make the Christian creed, with 
its rainbow of mysterious hopes, most credible. 

One is the character of God. “Nothing,” 
says Tertullian, “is so worthy of God as our 
salvation.” We have only to reflect, indeed, 
that 1f God is, in terms of morals, and on the 
scale of his nature, what he expects us to be 
in the scale of ours, then this vast and mys- 
terious redemption is not only credible, it is 
inevitable. It is exactly what God would do, 
ought to do, must have done. 

For let us imagine that in the palm of a 
mother’s hand lay the infinite wealth of God; 


128 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


that to the tenderness of a human mother’s 
heart were linked the wisdom and the omnip- 
otence of God. What son would then doubt 
the possibility of there coming into his life a 
redemption as rich in grace, as dazzling in 
scale as that depicted in the Gospels? What 
hope would be too great, what expectation too 
daring, for him to cherish? A mother’s love, 
linked to omnipotence, would make everything 
possible. 

Now, we are sure that with the infinite God 
the power and wisdom needed for redemption 
are present. And shall we dare to think that at 
the sublime point of love God is less than his 
creatures? “The power that produced Jesus 


’ 


must at least be equal to Jesus.”” That is sound 
logic, though it has Unitarian theology behind 
it: and it is a logic which runs far. It makes 
all tenderness of every human love one of the 
credentials of Christianity. 

The root of all skepticism as to the Christian 
scheme—the master doubt, hidden under a 
thousand disguises—is the thought that it is 


“too good to be true.” “Would that it were 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 129 


true!” the human soul sighs. ‘Would that it 
could be proved beyond all reach of doubt!’ 
But, somehow, this conception of a redemp- 
tion wrought out by the love of God—love that 
stoops to us from heights so great to a depth so 
low, love that reaches its end through suffering 
—actually exists. Who invented or imagined 
it? “Not God,” says doubt; “it is beyond his 
range’—for this is what “it is too good to be 
true” means—“it awoke in some dreaming 


5] 


human brain.” And so we are asked to believe 
this utterly incredible thing—that a human 
dream 1s greater than any divine reality can be. 
Christianity is not too good for man to imagine 
or invent; but it is too good for God to execute! 

Do our thoughts, it may be asked in reply, 
outrun those of God’s in any other realm? Do 
Wwe imagine better things than he has created, 
or can create, in the chambers of the material 
universe? Why should our dreams transcend 
God’s realities in the loftiest realm when they 
cannot do it in the lowest? ‘As the heavens 
are higher than the earth, so are my ways 
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than 


130 Tue BeLiers OF UNBELIEF 


your thoughts.” This is God’s own message 
to us; it is certainly true everywhere in the 
material universe; why should it not be true in 
the spiritual realm? And if it is true, then 
doubt about Christianity—doubt based on its 
too magnificent reading of divine grace, and otf 
human hope—is absurd. 

Perhaps the single new weapon Christian 
polemics in this generation has gained is that 
yielded by the larger scale, the infinitely height- 
ened glory, of the physical world, as interpreted 
by modern science. Early generations saw only 
the outposts of the innumerable armies of the 
skies. We can at least guess, as they could not, 
the height of the heavens, the scale of God's 
hosts. Moreover, the homely earth itself, un- 
der the lens of science, gleams with mysterious 
splendor. A speck of radium hides marvels in 
its tiny curve, more arresting to the imagina- 
tion than Saturn with its girdle of fire, or Jupi- 
ter with its cohort of flying moons. We have 
learned to track matter back to the point where 
it ceases to be matter, and by some strange 
transition becomes Force. 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 131 


So the pebble on the seashore, flung up by 
the last wave, as science has learned to read it, 
is a starry universe with a whole planetary 
system in each atom, its atom-planets divided 
from each other and from their suns by immen- 
sities of space relatively as great as the heavens 
themselves, and repeating incessantly the pag- 
eantry of sunset and dawn. What may be 
called the astronomy of dust is as dazzling as 
the astronomy of the nightly skies. 

A God “doing wonders” in every realm the 
mind can read or the senses discern—this is the 
lesson we are learning afresh, and with deeper 
meaning with every sunrise. And in that high- 
est realm, where God himself dwells, in the 
order of spiritual existence and in those quali- 
ties which belong to his own nature—in love 
and righteousness—shall we dare to imagine 
that God suddenly shrinks in scale, and becomes 
commonplace? Do his thoughts in those great 
heights move in smaller curves than those the 
planets know? The incarnation and the cross, 
tried by the one test of theit wonder, are the 
fitting and transcendent climax to the tran- 


132 THe Briers OF UNBELIEF 


scendent scale of God’s lower works, as we are 
beginning, at last, to discern it. 

This, the scale on which, in every other 
realm, God plans and works, is the second fact 
that makes redemption, as Christian faith con- 
ceives it, credible. The wonder of the physical 
universe, the wonder of its extent, its laws, its 
energies, give us, so to speak, the curve of the 
ellipse. With this majesty of conception God 
works in the realm of matter. When he passes 
into the kingdom of love, will anyone ask us to 
believe that he becomes commonplace? Is it 
credible that God has narrower thoughts and 
works on a meaner scale of splendor in the 
spiritual realm than in unconscious matter? 

For some the miracles ascribed to Christ 
seem incredibilities that make the whole story 
suspect. They are in quarrel with natural or- 
der. But such miracles, it should be remem- 
bered, are exactly in the key of Christ’s history 
as Christian faith reads it. “If one,” says Dr. 
Storrs, “walks along the path, over many lands 
through darkened centuries which Christianity 
has brightened with glowing lights, and on 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 133 


which she has strewn astonishing victories, he 
can hardly be amazed when he finds at the 
outset the deaf hearing, the blind seeing, the 
dumb made to speak, and the poor hearing the 
word of life. It will be to him harmonious as 
music, though loftier than the shining suns, to 
see the Lord of this religion arising from the 
grave and ascending in illustrious triumph to 
heaven!” 

The manner in which Christianity has af- 
fected the world corresponds to this great 
creed. It is a scheme, it may be admitted, so 
incredible in its grace that all our theologies 
are too small for it. Our hymns are not sweet 
enough for it. It is fairer than our dreams; 
it rises above our most daring hopes. Faith 
itself apprehends it with a slowness so tragical, 
and misapprehends it with a diligence so evil, 
that the wonder is it has not perished, killed by 
the narrowness and the quarrels of its pro- 
fessed adherents. If it were not divine, it must 
have died. 

siitentetives!) lt is ay creedtithatacreates 
saints. Men in every age have died for it. 


134 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Persecution has striven in vain to kill it. It 
does what no other creed known to history has 
done: it works spiritual miracles. In every 
land where its tale is told, and with every new 
sun that dawns, drunkards may be found whom 
it has made sober, thieves whom it has taught 
to be honest, harlots whom it has lifted up to 
chastity, selfish men who, touched by its breath, 
live by the great law of self-sacrifice. It is the 
root whence blossom infinite heroisms and 
charities. 

It is of Jesus Christ that the writer of Ecce 
Homo says: “All human sorrows hide in his 
wounds; all human self-denials lean on his 
cross.” That is but a picturesque way of say- 
ing—what is a commonplace—that all that is 
purest and strongest and sweetest in human 
life today takes its inspiration from Jesus 
Christ. 

To this one of the most famous of living 
scientists adds his testimony: “At the foot of 
the cross,” says Sir Oliver Lodge, “there has 
been a perennial experience of relief and reno- 
vation.” 


CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 135 


If a witness of another race is needed, let 

those fine and oft-quoted words of Heine be 
recalled: “How great a drama is the Passion 
of Christ! And how finely it is justified by the 
prophecies of the Old Testament! It was in- 
evitable; it was the red seal of faith; testamen- 
tum. . . . How gracious a figure is that of 
the Man-God! Moses loved his people with 
touching affection; he cared for that people’s 
future as a mother would. But Christ loved all 
humanity ; that Sun sent the flames of its benev- 
olent rays over all the world. His words are a 
balm for all the wounds this world can inflict, 
and the blood that was shed at Golgotha be- 
came a healing stream for all that suffer. . 
The white marble gods of the Greeks were 
spattered with this blood, and they sickened 
with inward terror, and could never more re- 
gain their health.” 


CHAPTER II 


TuE First ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN 
Fattu: A DIVINE CHARACTER 


The simple record of three short years of Christ’s active 
life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than 
all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations 
of moralists.—Lecxy, History of Morality, vol. ii, p. 88. 


What is the evidence on which this great 
faith rests? Putting aside all secondary and 
incidental arguments, it may be said with con- 
fidence that the whole cause of Christian faith 
may be risked on two facts: the fact of a divine 
Person and the fact of a divine history. The 
fact, that is, of Christ, and the fact of Chris- 
tianity. 

In a deep and most true sense, Jesus Christ 
proves himself. He who sees Mount Everest 
does not need the poor argument of the foot 
rule to persuade him that the sky-piercing peak, 
with its white crown of dazzling snows, actu- 


ally exists. And to look at Jesus Christ with 
136 


A DIvInE CHARACTER L3y 


uncolored vision is to believe in him. He is 
like no other figure on the world’s stage. Un- 
counted hosts of human beings—men of the 
loftiest intellect side by side with men of the 
most lowly heart and the most saintly life— 
have what may be scientifically described as a 
personal verification of the existence and of the 
divinity of Jesus Christ. 

They are conscious of being saved by him. 
They feel, every moment, the pulse of a life 
that beats direct from him. They know him 
to be the living root from which all that is best 
in their nature springs. Christ’s great parable 
of the vine and the branch is the exact tran- 
script of their experience. For them there is 
no rebuke for sin like his purity, no comfort 
for sorrow like his gentleness, no argument for 
hope like the vision of his face. His name, for 
them, is an open window into the very heart 
of God. His words are the supreme interpreta- 
tion of duty. 

By some strange compulsion the very ene- 
mies of Christ become his witnesses. ‘Never 
man spake like this man,” was the testimony of 


138 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


the rude soldiers sent to arrest him; and that 
witness is repeated afresh by every new genera- 
tion of skeptics. Unbelief, as little as belief, 
would take the greatest of the world’s poets 
and thinkers, and set them, as equals, side by 
side with Jesus of Nazareth. 

“It is no use,” says Mr. Campbell in that 
strange book, The New Theology—a book 
which might be described as metaphysical fog 
shot through with gleams of piercing light— 
“Tt is no use trying to place Jesus in a row 
along with other religious masters. He 1s first 
and the rest nowhere; we have no category for 
him.” 

There is a quality in the words of Christ, a 
power to reach the human conscience, which 
no poet or philosopher or scientist ever pos- 
sessed. He talks the language which the human 
soul instinctively recognizes to be divine. He 
interprets himself to us in strange, brief, death- 
less phrases which on any other lips would 
sound extravagant to the point of lunacy, but 
which on his lips seem natural. 

“T am,” he says, “the light of the world.” 


A DIvINE CHARACTER 139 


Imagine Plato saying that, or Epictetus, or 
John Stuart Mill! But on Christ’s lips the 
words shock nobody. They seem self-evident. 
They are a self-verifying revelation, with pro- 
foundest meaning in every syllable. Exactly 
as the light shuts up in its white purity the 
whole scale of color—the beauty of all flowers, 
the purple of far-off hills, the rainbow glories 
of sky and sea and earth—so the character of 
Jesus Christ is found to contain the elements 
of all goodness. Nay, exactly like the light, it 
possesses an energy which creates beauty in 
others. 

As every hint of grace in sky, or flower, or 
human face is born of the light, and lives by 
the light, so all that is lofty, or pure, or gentle 
in the world’s life today can be traced, directly 
or indirectly, to the teachings of Jesus Christ, 
and to the spiritual energy that streams from 
him. 

“T, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
draw all men unto me.” Here is another of 
the deep, bewildering sayings of Christ. What 
merely human lips could speak such words 


140 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


without kindling the laughter of the world! 
In the mouth of a Galilean peasant they sound 
like the wildest extravagance. But looked back 
upon across twenty centuries, we see that these 
words are an exact prophetic forecast of human 
history, fulfilled afresh with every day that 
dawns. God never hurries. Centuries with 
him are but as moments. But as seen in the 
perspective of history, how clear it is that, from 
the moment he hung on the cross, Christ, by 
some deep, mysterious attraction, has been 
drawing all men unto Himself. All the cur- 
rents of the living world are flowing Christ- 
ward, and must flow. 

Or take another of the profound utterances 
of Christ, words that overleap the boundaries 
of time, and have in them the vibrations of 
eternity: “When the Comforter is come, whom 
I will send unto you from the Father, . . 
he shall testify of me. . . . If I go not away, 
the Comforter will not come unto you; but if 
I depart, I will send him unto you. . 

He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of 
mine, and shall show it unto you.” 


A DIvINE CHARACTER IAI 


No one can read these words without feeling 
how profound a note they strike. Here is one 
who speaks as master of the spiritual world. 
His authority runs into those dim regions 


which lie beyond death. He declares that from 
beyond the grave, with forces moving at his 


bidding, and working to glorify him, he will 
touch and shape the world he has left. These 
are not accents that fit human speech. But they 
are natural on Christ’s lips; and once more the 
experience of twenty centuries attests their ful- 
fillment. Huis words as reported by his disciples 
have shaken thrones. They have outlasted 
kingdoms and dynasties. 

If a proof is wanted of the transcendent force 
that dwells in Jesus Christ, we find it in the 
impression he made on the men about him. He 
took a handful of Jewish fishermen, with the 
ignorance of their day, the narrowness of their 
race, and the prejudices native to their blood. 
They were bits of very common clay, and he 
touched them only for three brief years. To 
say they only half understood his words is 
quite insufficient; they visibly and grossly mis- 


142 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


apprehended them. And they witnessed what, 
to human eyes, must have seemed the shame 
and defeat of his death. This, surely, was 
enough to wreck faith! 

Yet the touch of Christ’s hands made these 
men not only saints—such saints as the world 
to that hour had never seen—it made them the 
world’s teachers. Not Plato talked like John, 
or Socrates like Paul. What philosopher or 
ethical teacher, up to the present moment, in- 
deed, has spoken with the accents of these men 
who caught their message from Christ’s lips? 

No one can pretend that it was by virtue of 
any endowment of natural genius these Gali- 
lean peasants rose to a point so high. They 
took their impulse from Christ. His Spirit, as 
he had promised, wrought in them when he 
himself had left the earth; and we can watch 
across two thousand years, and see, like erys- 
tals forming in some chemical solution, the 
faith of the early church in Christ taking shape. 

The process is clear, definite, inevitable; an 
evolution as plain as anything known to natural 
science, but it is an evolution shaped by forces 


A DIVINE CHARACTER 143 


that stream from the spiritual world. The area, 
in time, of Christ’s ministry is very brief, only 
three crowded years; but upon that little span 
of time beats, perhaps, a fiercer light than upon 
any other equal tract of human history. And, 
watching the impression made by Christ on 
those about him, we see, first, the mere wonder 
awakened by the miracles, the vague sense 
kindled of Something great, half understood, 
mysterious. This sense grows, but it is per- 
plexed by the shock to all the traditional ex- 
pectations of a Messiah. Guesses as to who 
Christ is run through the land. All men won- 
der, and the wonder spreads to the court, to the 
temple, as well as to the streets of the city, and 
the villages of Galilee. 

The inner circle round Christ shares that 
wonder; but faith there, at a fit moment, is 
brought to a climax by Christ’s challenge to 
Peter—“Whom do ye say that Lam?” Peter, 
when first brought to Christ by his brother 
Andrew, had been told, “We have found the 
Messias, . . . the Christ,’ and no doubt he 
was prepared to see in Jesus the Messiah of 


144 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Jewish expectation. But that expectation had 
been wrecked. Now, Peter has reached a 
loftier reading of the truth, and so comes his 
historic confession: “Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God.” 

The note here is personal, sure, lofty. In 
these memorable syllables faith makes its leap, 
its spring on to the high levels of Christian 
truth. And Christ seals the act with the great 
words: “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: 
for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto 
thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” On 
the truth of this confession Christ declares he 
will build his church. 

But Peter can keep on those great heights 
only for a step; with almost the next breath 
he is rebuking “the Son of the living God,” 
and undertaking to correct his plans! During 
Christ’s earthly ministry, indeed, his disciples 
never reached higher than that point of fitful, 
half-incredulous belief. “I have many things to 
say unto you,” said Christ before he left them; 
“but hitherto ye have not been able to receive 
them; neither yet can ye understand them.” 


A DIVINE CHARACTER I45 


Tnen came the shock of what seemed the 
final disaster and shame of the cross, a shock 
that threatened the whole wreck of faith. And 
the very hour of that wreck, while they are 
staggering under its shock, there broke in on 
the disciples the amazement of the resurrection 
and the wonder of the risen Christ. He is seen 
at last in his true glory; all that he has taught 
about himself falls into order; it kindles into 
clearness. We can discern, in the apostles, 
the awakening vision of sublime truths, the 
thrill of dawning intuitions, of great forces 
and emotions, in a word, trembling into a 
religion. | 

It is not yet a theology, though a theology is 
latent in it, and must soon come; but in both 
the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles we can 
see the mind of the new-born church adjusting 
itself to a world of new ideas. A complete new 
reading of the universe has broken in upon it. 
Not Columbus, when he caught, through the 
dark night, the gleam of light that streamed 
from the New World he was seeking, knew 
such wonder. Keats, in a famous sonnet, has 


146 Tur BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


pictured the emotions of “stout Cortez, when 
with eagle eyes,” he 
Stared at the Pacific—and all his men 


Looked at each other with a wild surmise— 
Silent upon a peak in Darien. 


The famous Spaniard had an unknown, un- 
charted ocean spread at his feet, on which no 
European ship had ever sailed. But the early 
church had a landscape nobler and fairer 
spread before it, a universe of new spiritual 
conceptions. And the key to it all was the real- 
ized personality of Christ. 

So when the new theology comes it is a 
Christology. The sense in the infant church is 
not that some new truth has been discovered, 
but, as Cairns puts it in his Christianity in the 
Modern World, that “some new and amazing 
thing has happened.’ The mind of the early 
church is preoccupied not with the miracles of 
Christ or with his parables, or with the Sermon 
on the Mount, but with the personality of 
Christ himself. The new theology, it may be 
repeated, is a Christology. The master truth 
for them is that “God was in Christ” ; God, not 


A DIVINE CHARACTER 147 


a far-off and dreadful Being to be sought, but 
a redeeming Saviour, seeking them. Kepler, 
when in a high mood of feeling, explained his 
science by saying, “I am thinking God’s 
thoughts after him,” and the whole theology of 
the early church consisted in thinking Christ’s 
thoughts after him. 

Great human discoveries, while they seem to 
exalt, in a sense, dwarf their discoverers. New- 
ton discovered the law of gravitation, and so 
won fame; but, set against the truth he dis- 
covered, how tiny is his scale! Darwin built 
with patient industry the magnificent formula 
of evolution, and in our exaggerated fashion 
we call his name “immortal.” But how much 
less is the discoverer than the thing discovered! 
Who can imagine Newton saying, “I am the 
law of gravitation,” or Darwin offering him- 
self to the world as being in his own person the 
formula of evolution! 

Now, Christ reveals great truths; but they 
center in him; they have no existence apart 
from him. “T am the truth,” he says; and 
this is exactly the vision the early church has 


148 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


of him. The proof of this is found in the new 
accent in which they speak of him. Peter’s 
“leap of faith” in the confession, “Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of the living God,” is an 
impulse exhausted almost at a breath; it is 
a sudden dazzling vision of truth, on which at 
the next moment falls an eclipse. 

Compare this with the majestic verses with 
which John’s Gospel opens. There is a sound 
in the very syllables as of the tread of some 
victorious host: “IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE 
WorpD, AND THE WorD WAS WITH GoD, AND 
THE WorD was Gop. THE SAME WAS IN THE 
BEGINNING WITH Gop. ALL THINGS WERE 
MADE BY HIM; AND WITHOUT HIM WAS NOT 
ANYTHING MADE THAT WAS MADE.” Peter’s 
confession is a leap, and a stumble; John walks 
on the great heights of faith with surest step. 

And the reading of Christ’s nature which we 
thus see taking possession of the consciousness 
of the early church, and kindling it to rapture 
and power, is still the central truth of Chris- 
tianity. This is the faith that has remade the 
world. Many are willing to sit at the feet of 


A DIVINE CHARACTER TAQ 


Christ as a Teacher, but they refuse to adore 
him as a Saviour. They are trying the melan- 
choly experiment of taking the spiritual ideas 
of Christ and rejecting his divine Personality. 
But the divorce is impossible. It would be fatal 
if it were possible. 

Yes: in all the later writings of the New 
Testament we can see the great conception of 
Christian faith taking conscious shape, and 
coming to its kingdom in the hearts of the 
first generation of Christ’s followers. In this 
way the Spirit of Christ so interpreted Christ 
to his followers, and enlarged their power to 
receive him, that they became at last saints of a 
type unknown in history, martyrs whose hero- 
ism is a kindling memory, teachers at whose 
feet each generation in turn is willing to sit. 

And Christ has still this strange power to 
transform men; a power which centuries, as 
they pass, leave unexhausted. Men are skepti- 
cal as to the miracles Christ wrought in the 
flesh two thousand years ago, but the miracles 
he works today in the enduring field of human 
character are beyond challenge. Suppose it be 


150 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


denied that he turned water into wine at Cana. 
It is historically certain that he turned a hand- 
ful of Galilean peasants into the world’s teach- 
ers. He transformed Saul the persecutor into 
Paul the saint. And he still keeps the key of 
all hearts; he puts his stamp on each genera- 
tion in turn. 

It 1s curious to note how each fresh student 
finds some independent argument for worship- 
ing Christ, something different from what 
other men see, and yet equally authoritative. A 
skeptic like Theodore Parker is lost in wonder 
at the human greatness of Christ: “The manli- 
est of men, humane as a woman, pious and 
hopeful as a prayer, brave as man’s most dar- 
ing thought. He has led the world in morals 
and religion for eighteen centuries because he 
was the manliest man in it, hence the most di- 
vine.” A saint like Phillips Brooks is most 
impressed by the sinlessness of Christ: “He is 
the one sinless Man in history, and even if he 
had done nothing else for our salvation, this 
makes him the most saving Fact that the world 


3) 


CvVcl, Saw: 


A. DIVINE CHARACTER 151 


A philosophic historian like Seeley declares 
that “Christ is surely the most sublime image 
offered to human imagination”; but the secret 
of his sublimity lies in the wedlock of measure- 
less power with inexpressible gentleness. This, 
says Seeley, “is the masterpiece of Christ.” It 
is ‘a sublime moral miracle superinduced upon 
a physical one.” 

A theologian such as Bushnell, on the other 
hand, finds the surest mark of Christ’s divinity 
in the strange union of perfect lowliness of 
spirit with the most solemn claims to super- 
natural authority. “I,” says Christ, “am meek 
and lowly of heart,” and no one doubts what 
may be called his infinite humility. Yet what 
voice that ever fell upon human ears uttered 
claims so transcendent! He claims to be the 
very root of our life: “J am the vine, ye are 
the branches.’ He offers himself to us as 
the one link betwixt the human race and 
God: “No man cometh unto the Father but 
by me.’ He lays his hands on the sweetest 
relationships of human life, and claims the 
right to come before them all: “He that loveth 


152 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


father or mother more than me 1s not worthy 
of me.” 

Now, the world is swift to discover conceit 
and pitiless to scourge it. On any other lips 
such words would kindle universal laughter. 
But on Christ’s lips they seem natural; and on 
this single point Bushnell challenges unbelief. 
“Come now all ye that tell us in your wisdom of 
the mere natural humanity of Jesus, select your 
best and wisest character; take the range, if 
you will, of all the great philosophers and 
saints, and choose out one that is most compe- 
tent; or, if perchance, some one of you may 
imagine that he is himself upon a level with 
Jesus (as we hear that some of you do), let him 
come forward in this trial and say: ‘Follow 
me. “Be worthy of me.’ Tam the light of the 
world. ‘Ye are from beneath, J am from 
above.’ ‘Behold a greater than Solomon is 
here.’ Take on all these transcendent assump- 
tions, and see how your glory will be sifted out 
of you by the detective gaze, and darkened by 
the contempt, of mankind! Why not? Is not 
the challenge fair? Do you not tell us that you 


A DIVINE CHARACTER Le. 


can say as divine things as he? Give us this 
one experiment, and see if it does not prove to 
you a truth that is of some consequence, 
namely, that you are a man, and that Christ 
Jesus is—more.” 


GEA LR ad 


THE SECOND ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN 
FatirH: A DiviNE HISTORY 


If Christ had not been what he was, and stood where he 
did, could anything in history be as it had been or as it is? 
Is there any person necessary in the same sense as he is to 
the higher history of man? May we not speak of him as 
the keystone of the arch which spans the gulf of time? But 
can we conceive that the keystone came there by accident, or 
otherwise than by the hand which built the bridge, which 
opened the chasm, and determined the course of the river that 
flows beneath?—Fatrpairn, Philosophy of the Christian Reli- 
gion, p. 567. 


But let the other fact which reinforces Chris- 
tian faith—the Christian system itself—be con- 
sidered. It is not a dream, an illusion, but a 
fact—visible, tangible, tremendous. ‘This far- 
off, untaught Jew, as those who deny his divin- 
ity must describe him, is the Founder, the Law- 
giver, the Judge of a new and divine society ; 
and this society is not like the Atlantis of 
Plato, or the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, a 


dream; it is not like the heavenly city, the New 
154 


A Divine History as 


Jerusalem which John saw in a vision, a far-off 
prophecy. It existsin history. It is part of the 
living world. No revolution can shake its deep 
foundations. Its citizens outnumber those of 
any earthly empire that can be named. It has 
survived the hates, the persecutions, the betray- 
als and corruptions of twenty centuries. No 
human name is inscribed on its gates; no hu- 
man genius has left its print on its constitution. 
It is the creation of Jesus Christ. And for 
Christian faith, at least, what is this but to say 
that, like the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem 
John saw, it has “descended out of heaven from 
God’? 

But putting this aside, it is certainly true that 
today, two thousand years after its Founder 
died a death of shame, Christianity is literally 
the biggest fact in the world. No other single 
force that can be named touches so many lives, 
or influences so profoundly the course of his- 
tory. History, indeed, is unintelligible with- 
out it. 

What may be called its external scale—its 
organized churches, its innumerable temples, 


156 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


its hymns, its charities, the music of its unceas- 
ing worship, the saintly lives it creates, the 
great missionary societies it maintains, its im- 
press on literature, on politics—all this is noth- 
ing less than wonderful. If anyone looks round 
on the civilized order of the world, and asks 
whose image and superscription does it bear— 
no matter how dimly—only one answer is pos- 
sible. It were as easy to untwist the light, de- 
stroy half the primary colors and leave the 
color scheme of nature unaffected as to take out 
of the literature, the politics, the art, the do- 
mestic life of the world what Christ gives to 
them and leave them undestroyed. 

Christianity, in brief, is to the daily life of 
the world what gravitation is in the kingdom 
of matter, a force to be reckoned with every- 
where. It affects every interest as gravitation 
affects every atom. Its theology, indeed, is 
still in the stage of conflict ; but its moral ideals, 
running in advance of its doctrines, have cap- 
tured the world. Men who cannot accept the 
Christian creed yet acknowledge the authority 
and supremacy of Christian ethics. 


A Divine History 157 


ere, then, is a fact which has’ to: be ex- 
plained. It has been produced, let us say for 
the sake of argument, by some unknown Cause. 
Now, on scientific grounds, we are sure that an 
effect so stupendous in its range, and that per- 
sists through so many centuries, must have a 
Force behind it equal to it in scale. To say that 
the cause is a delusion, born in the cradle of 
some dreaming and undisciplined brain, is ab- 
surd. Realities are not born of delusions. To 
take a dozen fishermen and tentmakers, two 
thousand years distant, with a bundle of self- 
generated superstitions, and offer them as an 
explanation of Christianity, is like offering a 
box of matches as the force which has lit the 
flame of Jupiter. 

What human genius is capable of in states- 
manship, in literature, in philosophical specula- 
tion, in war, is known and can be measured. 
We have only to take the great figures that 
from time to time appear on the world’s stage 
—Plato in philosophy, Alexander in war, Cz- 
sar in the arts of government—to get the curve 
which limits what is possible to human genius. 


158 Tue Beviers OF UNBELIEr 


But, for one thing, there is no Plato or Alex- 
ander or Cesar in Christian history to explain 
it. And can anyone imagine that if all the poets 
and metaphysicians, all the soldiers and states- 
men of all the ages—all the great names of his- 
tory, in a word, put together—had been in the 
service of Christianity, this would be a suf- 
ficient explanation of the scale to which it has 
grown, the persistency with which it endures, 
and the place it fills in the lives of men? 

This far-off Jew alone has wrought this mir- 
acle; and all the wonders, real or alleged, de- 
scribed in the four Gospels, are trivial com- 
pared with the miracle of contemporaneous 
Christianity itself. It belongs to an order of 
things beyond the power of human genius to 
imagine or accomplish. 

We are sure on scientific grounds, again, 
that the force behind Christianity, which ex- 
plains its existence, must be like it in character 
as well as equal to it in scale. If it is idle to 
offer a delusion as the cause which explains 
Christianity, it is even more absurd to offer a 
fraud. 


A Divine History 159 


Christianity, on any theory as to its origin, 
is a force making for truth, for righteousness, 
for purity; and such a force is not generated 
in the bosom of a lie. The moral energy which 
is slowly but visibly reshaping the civilization 
of the world, which has created a new con- 
science in the race, and is calling into existence 
new ideals of beneficence and purity and good- 
ness, must flow from some pure and divine 
source. 

But, it may be asked, may not the same thing, 
in a lesser degree at least, be said of the other 
religions of the world—of Mohammedanism, 
of Buddhism, etc.? 

It may be gladly admitted that there are 
strange anticipations of Christ’s teaching in 
other and older books: in the Talmud, in the 
sacred writings of Buddhism, or of Confucius; 
though it is not quite true that the Sermon on 
the Mount is, in Professor Clifford’s words, 
“Just Rabbi Hillel recast.” There are reflec- 
tions of Christ’s teaching in later books, such 
as the Koran. It might be a sufficient reply to 
ask that the New Testament as a whole should 


160 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


be compared with the sacred writings of other 
religions as a whole, and to remember that 
Professor Max Muller, when he published the 
Sacred Books of the East, in England, ex- 
plained that there were whole sections that he 
dared not publish in English, lest he should lay 
himself open to a criminal prosecution. Yet it 
may be gladly acknowledged that— 


The prophets of the elder day, 
The slant-eyed sages of Cathay, 
Read not the riddle all amiss 

Of higher life evolved from this. 


These starry gleams in the dark literature of 
earlier ages are broken rays of the divine light, 
but Christ is the sunrise. His teaching does 
not contradict what is best in the writings of 
the sages and teachers of heathenism. It moves 
on the line of their best, and runs into realms 
to which they never come. Christ, in a word, 


Gathers in one sheaf complete, 
The scattered blades of God’s own wheat. 


But Christ does more than merely add new 
realms to the tiny area of truth the race pos- 
sessed, He has opened the gates into a new 


A Diving History 161 


universe. He has taught us that the cross on 
which the Sinless One died for the sinful is the 
supreme interpretation of God. This is more 
than a revelation; it is a revolution. 

The Sermon on the Mount is to the best 
things in heathen literature what the planet 
Jupiter is to a street lamp. Yet if the Sermon 
on the Mount were all that Christ had given us, 
he would only be a better sort of Plato, an 
Epictetus with a finer accent. Christ, it must 
be repeated, brings to the race not a-new ethical 
system, but a new and supreme ethical energy. 
The system he founded not only proclaims the 
doctrine of that central miracle of the spiritual 
universe—the new birth; it actually works that 
miracle; does it perennially; does it with each 
new day in the experience of multitudes. 

Mohammedanism is one of the three great 
monotheistic religions of the earth; and the one 
effective truth it possesses, the doctrine that 
God is One, is borrowed from the Bible. Hin- 
duism, again, shows how deep and indestructi- 
ble an element in human nature religion is. 
Whoever made man drew the plan of his nature 


162 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


on the lines of religion; and Hinduism, like 
every other form of heathenism, is a melan- 
choly illustration of what the religious instinct 
is without a divine revelation such as Christian- 
ity brings. Buddhism is merely the moral re- 
form of an idolatrous religion; and it is a re- 
form which has failed. 

These religions, when set beside Christianity, 
and tried by the test of their moral scale, are 
like the sandheaps children have piled on the 
beach as compared with the steadfast hills that 
girdle the far-off horizon. 

But it may be asked, again, what about the 
darker side of Christianity—its schisms, its 
heresies, its persecutions, the ecclesiastical 
quarrels which break it into fragments? 

The existence of these things is not to be de- 
nied. They show how stubborn are the forces 
in human life which make for evil, and how 
tragically slow the human mind is to compre- 
hend the true genius of Christianity. But that 
it is so slow to understand and to assimilate it 
is another proof that it is utterly incapable of 
inventing it. And what more shining proof 


A Divine HIstTory 163 


of the divine origin of Christianity can be 
imagined than the fact that it has survived, 
through all these centuries, the heresies and 
disloyalties of its own followers? 

The strength of the argument for the sepa- 
rate and divine character of Jesus Christ may 
be brought out in another way. The story of 
the death of Socrates is, in some senses, the 
high-water mark not only of Greek, but of unt- 
versal, literature. The Phaedo has made it 1m- 
mortal. It is the death scene of Socrates, as 
told by Plato: and the tale has in it every ele- 
ment of pathos and beauty; it is set, too, in an 
atmosphere of profound feeling. 

The sacred ship has just arrived from Delos. 
It is the death signal, and Socrates, before he 
drinks the hemlock, sits among his friends and 
holds high debate on the great theme of immor- 
tality. The sanest, if not the loftiest, intellect 
the human race has produced, just as he passes 
into the shadow and mystery of death, pauses 
to tell us why he believes death cannot slay him. 
And the smile on his face as he talks, the serene 
courage, the unfaltering accents, give strange 


164 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


power to his logic. Never did a brave spirit 
pass out of life more bravely; and the art of the 
story, with its occasional play of humor, its 
points of homely incident, is nothing less than 
exquisite. 

Now, let the immortal scene in the prison on 
the Agora at Athens be contrasted with the 
scene in the upper room at Jerusalem. If Soc- 
rates and Christ are both men, and are to be 
judged by human conditions, it cannot be 
doubted that the Greek ought to outsoar and 
outshine the Jew. Socrates represents the 
flower of Greek genius, in the very climax of 
Grecian history. He is a philosopher, familiar 
with great affairs and great men, wise with the 
wisdom of seventy years, and wise in the 
knowledge of all the schools. His life had been 
one long intellectual discipline, and in that last 
scene he has Plato for reporter. Christ, on the 
other hand, is a Galilean peasant, with only 
peasants for followers and friends. 

And yet by what measureless degrees the 
Galilean exceeds the Greek! The merely intel- 
lectual note is incomparably higher. Let there 


A Divine History 165 


be recalled the account Socrates gives of what 
may be called the geography of Hades—Tar- 
tarus, with its tangle of dark rivers—some of 
fire, and some of mud—its vague seas, its 
troops of phantom spirits; the reincarnation of 
the wicked as hawks and vultures, and of the 
good as bees, wasps, ants, or—climax of bliss! 
—as philosophers. With this, compare the calm 
words, the high and serene certainty of Jesus 
Christ: “In my Father’s house are many man- 
sions: if it were not so, I would have told you. 
I go to prepare a place for you.” 

The moral note, again, is not merely infinitely 
higher, it belongs to another order. In the 
scene in the Agora what is there which corre- 
sponds to that pathetic act when Christ girded 
himself with a towel and washed the disciples’ 
feet—the sublimest object-lesson imaginable as 
to the law and habit of love up to which he 
was lifting his followers? ‘The Greek sends 
away his wife and children as irrelevant and 
disturbing influences, or tools for which he has 
no further use. The only moral advice Socrates 
can offer the little debating society in which he 


166 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


sits is to neglect and despise the body; like phi- 
losophers, they are to believe that the invisible 
soul is the only reality, and to treat everything 
except it as shadows. The proofs of immortal- 
ity Socrates details are the arguments of a phi- 
losopher, and are addressed to philosophers. 
They are ingenious and subtle—often over- 
subtle. 

But in spite of his high courage the Greek 
can offer his listening friends nothing very cer- 
tain. He justifies his sketch of Hades by say- 
ing: “It is well to find a charm for one’s fears, 
and on this account it is that I thus prolong my 


b 


tale.’ Who will be their teacher, he is asked, 
when he is gone? Greece, he tells them, “is a 
wide place, and there are in it many good men. 
There are, besides, many races of Barbarians, 
all of whom are to be explored”—in search of 
someone who can supply such a charm as they 
are discussing, a charm for death. Of himself 
he says, “Whether I tried in the right way, and 
with what success, I shall know certainly when 
I arrive there,” but not till then. 


Let all this be compared with the accents of 


A Divine History 167 


Christ, “I go to prepare a place for you. . 

I will come again, and receive you unto myself ; 
that where I am, there ye may be also.” “When 
the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto 
you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, 
which proceedeth from the Father, he shall tes- 
tify of me.” There speaks the Lord of life and 
death—of this and of all other worlds! 

The contrast betwixt the two figures 1s meas- 
ureless. Socrates argues, Christ announces. 
The one guesses, the other knows. Socrates 
reasons and refines like a philosopher; Christ 
talks in the accents of a Redeemer. ‘The last 
words of Socrates are: ‘‘Crito, we owe a cock 
to ZEsculapius; discharge it, and do not neglect 
it.’ Compare with this the last utterance of 
Christ: “Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit;” or, “Father, forgive them, for they 
know not what they do.” We repeat that, tak- 
ing the purely human elements, the Greek 
ought to move at a higher level than the Jew; 
and yet as the two figures stand side by side, 
who will deny that Christ belongs to a different 
order—to an immeasurably loftier order—than 


108 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Socrates? Whence did Christ get his unique 
scale? 

And let the impression that each has made on 
the human race be contrasted. No human soul 
turns back to Socrates for redemption. No pil- 
low under a dying head is made softer by hav- 
ing the Phaedo beneath it. No mother standing 
beside her child’s grave tries to heal her broken 
heart with the logic of the Agora. But the 
supper in the upper room at Jerusalem has be- 
come a sacrament for all time and for all gen- 
erations. The words of Christ in that scene 
have changed the world’s history. The con- 
trast betwixt Socrates and Christ in these par- 
allel scenes is incontrovertible and measureless. 
How is it to be explained? 

One of two things is absolutely certain: 
either Christ was more than Socrates, and 
“more” in the sense that he belonged to a dif- 
ferent order of being, or else those who in- 
- vented that story of the upper room in Jeru- 
salem were greater than Plato. And as there 
were four of them, this theory carries with it 
the belief that there were four Jewish Platos, 


A Divine History 169 


who, without any touch of Greek genius, 
imagined more nobly than the greatest genius 
Greece ever produced; and who, being them- 
selves rogues—since they have forged the story 
—yet invented a tale so rich in moral elements 
that it has given the human race itself a new 
system of ethics. 

We know, on the strength of an epigram 
written to refute it, that somebody, centuries 
afterwards, denied that Plato had written the 
Phaedo. “If Plato did not write it,’ ran the 
epigram, “then there were two Platos.’”’ But, 
as we have seen, the theory which rejects the 
divinity of Jesus Christ requires us to believe in 
four Platos; all of them Jewish peasants, all of 
them rogues; all of them agreed in one inven- 
tion, exquisitely the same, yet exquisitely dif- 
ferent; and all of them accomplished the mir- 
acle of making a lie a more effective instrument 
of morality than all the truths of all the philos- 
ophers history knows. The belief of unbelief 
at this point leaves the faith of universal 
Christianity dwarfed and microscopic. 

For some the fundamental conception of 


170 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Christianity, the entrance of Christ as a new 
and divine force in human history, is made 
incredible by the fact that it seems in quarrel 
with what they hold to be the master truth of 
science, the theory of evolution. On the ex- 
treme reading of the evolution theory the cos- 
mos is a sealed chamber. Nothing can appear at 
any stage in the process which was not present 
at the starting point. Evolution tolerates no 
new factors, still less one so revolutionary—so 
completely out of the natural order—as Christ 
interpreted by Christian faith seems to be. 

But the formula of evolution must find room 
for new factors, or it is visibly inadequate as 
an explanation of the system of things. The 
great uniformities of nature know gaps which 
can only be filled by new creative acts. 

Evolution, for example, has no explanation 
for the fact of life. Life, it is certain, cannot 
be explained by its physical antecedents; and it 
is the circumstance that evolution can offer no 
explanation of the appearance of life which still 
keeps that great theory in the hypothetical 
stage. “Spontaneous generation,” says Huxley, 


A Divine HIsToRy oa 


“is a necessary corollary from Darwin’s 
views,” but it is a corollary which is unjustified 
by any known evidence. The great teachers of 
evolution have an almost invincible bias in 
favor of the doctrine that the gap betwixt the 
living and the nonliving can be bridged; but no 
known bridge exists, and they are too honest to 
deny the facts. Almost every famous name in 
modern science can be quoted in proof of the 
doctrine that life cannot be explained by its 
physical antecedents. “If the evolution hypo- 
thesis is true,” says Huxley,’ “living matter 
must have arisen from not living matter.” But 
in his address as President of the British Asso- 
ciation he declared the case against the produc- 
tion of life from the nonliving to be “victorious 
dueaionoatiesline ) Che present state (or 
knowledge,” he wrote, “furnishes us with no 
link between the living and the not living.” 
Darwin himself wrote: “No evidence worth 
anything has as yet been advanced in favor of a 
living being being developed from inorganic 
matters, /yndall) and ierbert) spencer are 


1Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘‘ Biology.’’ 


172 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


equally emphatic. “Life,” says Spencer, “can- 
not be conceived in physicochemical terms.” “I 
affirm,” says Tyndall, “that no shred of trust- 
worthy experimental evidence exists to prove 
that life in our day has ever appeared inde- 
pendently of antecedent life.”* “Transubstan- 
tiation would be nothing to this,” says Huxley, 
“Gf it happened.” 

Science, then, has no explanation to offer of 
the sudden emergence in the process of evolu- 
tion of the phenomenon of life. Wallace, who 
shares with Darwin the honor of the discovery 
of evolution, declares “there are at least 
three stages in the development of the organic 
world where some new cause or power must 
necessarily have come into action.”* ‘The first 
is in the change from inorganic to organic. 
“The first vegetable cell was a new thing in the 
world, possessing altogether new powers.” 
This was life, but still life without conscious- 
ness. The next stage “still more completely,” 
says Wallace, “beyond all possibility of ex- 


1 Nineteenth Century, 1898, p. 507. 
2Darwinism, p. 474. 


A Divine History Tye 


planation, by matter, its laws and forces, is sen- 
sation or consciousness; the distinction betwixt 
the vegetable and the animal.” The third gap 
in the process of evolution is the appearance of 
self-conscious mind. 

If the formula of evolution, therefore, is so 
narrowly construed that the entrance of any 
new factor is forbidden, these three great facts 
are left unexplained. Christian faith can ac- 
cept evolution as the mode in which God has 
administered his universe, but God cannot be 
conceived as touching his universe only at the 
starting point and then emigrating from it for- 
ever. These gaps in the process of evolution 
are, as Christian faith reads the problem, 
bridged by creative acts; and there is an order 
in the entrance of these new factors. They rise 
step above step; and each new factor in turn 
uses the realm beneath it as its servant. Life, 
consciousness, personality—this is the order of 
time in which they make their appearance; but 
this is also the order of thought. It represents 
a true ascent in values. The outlines of some 
great pyramid, rising to an apex, are visible. 


174 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


And if at some point above human personal- 
ity there breaks into the process a Personality 
which is divine, what is this but the philosophic 
and scientific, as well as the religious, apex of 
the great pyramid of the universe? Christ's 
entrance into the evolutionary process on this 
reading does not arrest or destroy the process. 
It is its consummation. It is not a discord 
striking across the music of the universe; it is 
the perfection of its harmony. 

It must be remembered that, by the admis- 
sion of Huxley himself, the great protagonist 
of the evolution theory, that theory does not 
extend to morals. We can only reach what is 
ethically best by inverting its principles. “The 
practice of that which is ethically best—what 
we call goodness or virtue—involves,” says 
Huxley, “a course of conduct which, in all re- 
spects, is opposed to that which leads to suc- 
cess in the cosmic struggle for existence. In 
place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self- 
restraint; its influence is directed not so much 
to the survival of the fittest as to the fitting of 
as many as possible to survive. It repudiates 


A Divine History Leis 


the gladiatorial theory of existence.” He sums 
up the position by saying: “Let us understand, 
once for all, that the ethical progress of society 
depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, 
still less in running away from it, but in com- 
bating: it.” 

Now, if the practice of morality in its highest 
terms puts aside the principles on which the 
evolution theory is built, does anyone wonder 
that the highest expression, in living and per- 
sonal terms, of the highest ethics should be, not 
the product of evolution, but the entrance into 
it of a new force, from still higher levels of 
life? On scientific principles, in a word—on 
the principles of the evolution theory itself— 
human history in the moral realm needs an in- 
carnation. 

On such a basis of proof as is here, in the 
briefest fashion suggested, the Christian faith 
stands. And ina world where men, every hour 
of the day, and in every concern of daily life, 
have to act on imperfect knowledge—on evi- 
dence which stops short of mathematical cer- 
tainty—what faintest justification can there be 


176 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


for putting Christianity aside as a thing it is 
safe to ignore? 

The Christian does not risk life and death on 
a guess. He does not wander ina realm of dim 
uncertainties. The sunshine lies about him. 
The ground under his feet is firm, the skies 
above are radiant. Bushnell puts very happily 
the conclusion of the whole argument: 

“The world itself is changed; it has never 
been the same since Jesus left it. The air is 
charged with heavenly odors, and a kind of 
celestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, 
is wafted on us in its breath. Let the dark ages 
come, let society roll backward, and churches 
perish in whole regions of the earth; let infi- 
delity deny, and, what is worse, let spurious 
piety dishonor, the truth. Still, there is some- 
thing here that was not, and something that 
has immortality in it. Still our confidence re- 
mains unshaken, that Christ and his all-quick- 
ening life are in the world, as fixed elements, 
and will be to the end of time. For Christianity 
is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as 
of a perfect character; and how can a perfect 


A Divine History 177 


character, once entered into life and history, be 
separated and finally expelled? Look ye hither, 
all ye blinded and fallen mankind; a better na- 
ture is among you; a pure heart, out of some 
pure world, is come into your prison, and walks 
it with you. Do you require of us to tell you 
who he is, and definitely expound his person? 
We may not be able. Enough to know that he 
is not of us—some strange being out of nature 
and above it, whose name is Wonderful. 
Enough that sin has never touched his hallowed 
nature, and that he is a friend. In him dawns 
a hope—purity has not come into our world, 
except to purify. ‘Behold the Lamb of God, 
which taketh away the sin of the world!’ Light 
breaks in, peace settles on the air, and lo! the 
prison walls are giving way—rise, let us go.” 


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Tue [THEORY THAT Curist NEVER EXISTED 


It is no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, 
is not historical. Who amongst his disciples, or amongst their 
proselytes, was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to 
Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the 
Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly 
not Saint Paul, whose idiosyncrasies were of a totally differ- 
ent sort—JoHN Stuart Mii, Three Essays on Religion, p. 
253. 

Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived—that their 
story is a lie—but who did their works and thought their 
thoughts? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What 
man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus.— 
THEODORE PARKER, Discourses on Religion, p. 276. 


We have now reached the point at which we 
can ask what, if this faith about Christ be re- 
jected, are the substitutes which must take its 
place? To criticise is not enough; we have to 
explain. Christ certainly cannot be dismissed 
as an idle problem that calls for no explana- 
tion: a figure so remote, or so insignificant, that 


we may treat it as nonexistent. His very name 
181 


182 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


is a solvent. It is a test both for men and na- 
tions. “What shall I do with Jesus who is 
called Christ?” asked the perplexed Roman 
governor two thousand years ago, and every 
man, in turn, stands where Pilate stood, and 
must ask and answer his question. 

And if Christ be dismissed as a dream, or an 
impostor, it is certain that Someone, or Some- 
thing, must take his place. The soul, like na- 
ture, abhors a vacuum. Doubt about Christ 
is itself a creed about him. Who dismisses 
Christ from his life affirms by that act that he 
has a creed about him more satisfying, better 
authenticated by evidence, and burdened with 
fewer difficulties than the accepted belief of 
Christianity. Where is such an alternative 
creed to be discovered? 

The direct alternatives to Christian faith, as 
a matter of fact, are few in number, and per- 
fectly definite in character. The difficulties 
they raise, the weight of evidence on their side, 
can be easily assessed. Plain sense can judge 
their value when cast in the scale against the 
general belief about Christ. 


CHRIST’S NONEXISTENCE 183 


There is, first of all, the theory that Jesus 
Christ never existed. He is the dream of a 
forgotten poet, or even the invention of a 
perished rogue—a rogue who has somehow 
succeeded in tricking the world for twenty 
centuries, but whose name, curiously enough, 
nobody has ever succeeded in discovering. The 
name of Christ is, on this theory, nothing better 
than the label of a fraud, or of an aggregation 
of frauds, which have gathered round mere 
vacancy. Christ's feet never trod the soil of 
Palestine. His face is an illusion; his miracles 
are fables; his whole story is a fiction; behind 
his teaching there is no real voice. 

The world, we are asked to believe, dates its 
chronology from an event which never hap- 
pened, and Christianity is that scientific impos- 
sibility, an effect without a cause; a chain that 
has no first link; a geometrical progression of 
which the starting point is a cipher. 

This is an explanation of Jesus Christ it is 
impossible to take seriously. No scholar would 
make himself responsible for it; no historian 
will lend it the shelter of his name. 


184 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


The higher critics of the more reckless school 
have whittled down Christ’s sayings to the van- 
ishing point. Only twelve poor words, we are 
asked to believe, survive their performances. 
But even these twelve words imply that Christ 
existed. The lonely, mutilated syllables must 
have behind them a life and the teachings of 
a life. These teachings as a whole, we are 
assured, have somehow slipped from human 
memory; but they must have been in keeping 
with the divine words which even a Schmeidel 
admits undoubtedly came from Christ’s lips. 
The notion, in a word, that there never was 
a Christ is an incredibility which requires a 
hundred times more faith for its acceptance 
than belief in all the creeds of all the churches. 

Christ, on the theory that he never existed, 
is only a portrait, and a portrait with no face 
behind it. And yet, somehow, this imaginary 
face has changed the world’s history. How did 
a cluster of Jewish peasants and fishermen 
paint a face beyond the reach of any skill 
known to the genius of Michael Angelo or 
Raphael? Nay, they painted four such por- 


Curist’s NONEXISTENCE 185 


traits, and they all agree, in spite of a score 
of differences: they are all charged with the 
same mysterious power. It is surely more 
credible, to quote Rousseau, that such a Person 
actually existed, than that four men should in- 
dependently invent him. 

The Jew of the time of Augustus Cesar, it 
may be added, was perhaps the one figure in 
the human race least disposed to attempt such 
an invention. His virtues as well as his limita- 
tions disqualified him. The stubborn mono- 
theism of his faith predisposed him to reject an 
incarnation ; the cast-iron quality of his moral- 
ity made the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ 
to him not only incredible but unthinkable. He 
was jealous in temper; caste pride burned in 
him like a flame; for all other nations he had 
the scorn a Brahman feels for the pariah. Was 
he likely to welcome, still more to invent, a 
religion that claimed to be universal, and whose 
generous appeal overleaped all race distinc- 
tions? 

And if the Jews were incapable of drawing 
the portrait of Christ, certainly the first gen- 


186 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


erations of Christians were equally incapable 
of the task. All that the Christians of after 
time could do with the original delineation of 
Christ, says Henry Rogers, was—‘‘to spoil it.” 

The proof of the existence of any great char- 
acter in history—say of Homer, or of Alexan- 
der, or Ceesar—does not consist in a legal cer- 
- tificate of birth, or the formal verdict of a jury 
of their contemporaries. It is found in the sig- 
nature on literature, or history, these men have 
made. 

What is the evidence that Shakespeare lived? 
He is not, like Christ, twenty centuries distant; 
less than four hundred years part him from us. 
And yet how little of first-hand and detailed 
evidence we have as to Shakespeare’s existence, 
or as to the facts of his life! The dates of the 
principal events in his history—of his birth, of 
his marriage, and of his plays—are all matters 
of dispute. His biography is, for the most part, 
a catalogue of guesses. There are sixteen dif- 
ferent ways of spelling his very name. Only 
five autographs, with more or less of highly 
doubtful evidence as to their genuineness, sur- 


Curist’s NONEXISTENCE 187 


vive. A controversy, which has created a vast 
literature of its own, as to whether he really 
wrote the plays that bear his name, still rages. 
But who asks for a certificate of Shake- 
speare’s birth, and a complete biography, with 
verified dates, before believing there was a 
Shakespeare? His plays are his credentials. 
Nobody will believe that a myth wrote Hamlet. 
Shakespeare or Bacon are only labels for the 
subtle, magnificent genius that gave us Mac- 
beth and the Midsummer Night’s Dream. 
The labels may be shifted; but it is not possible 
to deny that someone lived, with the imagina- 
tion of a Shakespeare, who created these mas- 
terpieces of literature. The English language 
itself is the proof that Shakespeare lived. No 
myth will explain the museum at Stratford. 
And these arguments, multiplied a hundred- 
fold, constitute the evidence that Jesus Christ 
was a real Person. It is not merely that the 
almanac, in which all civilized time is dated 
from his birth, proves that Christ existed. His- 
tory, taken as a whole, is unintelligible without 
him; the living world is unintelligible. “It is 


188 TuE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Christ who rules British India,” says Keshab 
Chunder Sen, the greatest spiritual genius 
modern India has produced, when trying to 
explain the puzzle of two hundred and ninety- 
four million of the human race governed by 
forty million onthe other side of the planet. 
And Christ is the key to all the puzzles of the 
living world. When anyone undertakes to 
prove that Christ did not exist two thousand 
years ago he may well be asked to attempt a 
feat much nearer at hand. Let him prove that 
he does not exist today! 

Shakespeare touched, and still touches, only 
one realm of human life. Christ touches all 
races and generations. Time, for him, has no 
arresting force; space has no separating power. 
We know that he exists as we know that there 
is a force like gravitation, or an energy like 
electricity. The pull of every atom of matter 
proves the one; the tinkle of every telephone 
bell is witness to the other. 

This, in the last analysis, is the supreme evi- 
dence of the existence of Christ. His hand is 
visibly on the world’s life today. ‘There are 


Curist’s NONEXISTENCE 189 


myriads of living men and women who know 
that he touches their sin to rebuke it, their grief 
to comfort it, their conscience to quicken it. 
Fle is working these miracles now, exactly as 
he did in the days of his flesh two thousand 
years ago; the only difference is that today his 
miracles are wrought in spiritual terms. 

And, it may be repeated, the appeal is not to 
the subjective experiences of individual men 
and women merely. It is to the changed curve 
in the history of the race. 

The discovery of the planet Neptune is one 
of the romances of astronomy. A scientific ob- 
server studying the orbit of Uranus found that 
at one point the planet swung from its true 
path. What force was it which, across meas- 
ureless leagues of space, touched the planet 
with some strange disturbing influence, and 
drew it intoa new course? It was scientifically 
certain that some unknown body was calling to 
its sister planet, and attracting it with an ener- 
gy sufficient to change its orbit. And following 
the clew of that calling force—measuring the 
strength and following the line of its pull— 


190 Ture BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Neptune, the loneliest and remotest planet in 
the group, spending a hundred and sixty-five 
solar years in its mighty curve round the sun, 
was discovered. 

And who looks at the history of the human 
race sees that at a certain moment the curve of 
its orbit is suddenly changed. Up to a certain 
point the course of history is a straight line, 
and a line, alas! that runs downward. But at 
a given moment—a moment perfectly ascer- 
tainable—the line of history is deflected; it 
turns upward; it runs upward still! And at 
the point of the curve stands one Figure. It is 
the figure of the Galilean! 

Whatever theory men may hold as to his na- 
ture, or his character, or his teaching, it is a 
fact beyond sane doubt that Christ has changed 
the entire course of human history. He has set 
the race moving on a new curve, and under the 
action of new forces. And as a mute and im- 
pressive witness of that fact civilized mankind 
reckons its time from his birth. To deny that 
he existed is to say that the planet Uranus 
moved on a new ellipse without the action of 


CHRIST’s NONEXISTENCE 1g] 


any force to explain the change. No explana- 
tion of the changed direction of the history and 
the civilization of the world is possible save 
that which is found in the emergence of a new 
and divine Personality. 

Suppose that some lunatic astronomer denied 
the existence of the sun. Its light, he might 
contend, is quite insufficient as a proof of the 
sun’s existence. What is light but a vibration 
in the ether acting on the optic nerve, and pro- 
ducing a certain change in the gray matter of 
the brain. If the optic nerve behind the pupil 
of the eye be snapped or diseased, is it not cer- 
tain that, for the owner of that nerve, the glory 
of the sun perishes? 

But the whole solar system, it might be re- 
plied, is a proof that the sun exists. Its order, 
its balance, the silent, unceasing rhythm of the 
planets constitute the evidence that the sun is a 
reality. The “pull” of the sun is needed to ex- 
plain the mathematics of the solar system. And 
in exactly the same way the history, the civil- 
ization, the life of the world about us are un- 
intelligible apart from the fact of Jesus Christ. 


CLEAR DE hat 


THE THEORY THAT CHRIST WAS AN IMPOSTOR 


Christ pours out a doctrine beautiful as the light, sublime 
as heaven, and true as God.—THEopORE PARKER, Discourses 
on Religion, p. 303. 


It must be taken as certain that Christ ex- 
isted; but it may be argued that, at least, his 
claim to be divine is false; and if false, it must 
represent the fraud of an impostor, a trick 
played on the imagination of an unscientific 
age. If Christ was a man exactly like the rest 
of his race, and with the qualities and limita- 
tions of other men, he must have known this, 
assuming him to be sane; and when he claimed 
to be more than man he was—to put it in plain 
words—a conscious deceiver. He is not the 
creation, but the creator, of a fraud. 

His miracles, on this theory, were nothing 
better than tricks, and he knew it. His pre- 
tensions to supernatural authority were either 


lies, or flights of lunacy. His sayings about 
192 


CHRIST AN IMPOSTOR 193 


himself, indeed, on the supposition that he was 
only a man, are in exactly the accents of lunacy. 
“I,” he says, “am the light of the world.” 
When he spoke those words, did he know him- 
self to be an unlettered man, the son of a peas- 
ant, his only school of philosophy the village 
carpenter’s shop? “Come unto me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
rest.” Behind that strange call was there noth- 
ing but a human consciousness? “I am the 
bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never 
hunger ; and he that believeth on me shall never 
thirst.” What man has the right to speak such 
words to his fellow-men? 

If the speaker was only an untaught, undis- 
tinguished Jew, no different from any other 
Jew of his time, a Galilean peasant in the days 
when Palestine was a province of the Czsars, 
then he was not merely an impostor, he was the 
most ridiculous impostor the race has produced. 
And what is curious, he was an impostor with- 
out the motives of one. For Christ never de- 
ceived himself. He knew that at the end of his 
brief ministry the cross waited for him. 


194 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


An impostor! Then the one effective moral 
teacher human history knows was a rogue who 
spent his life—nay, who laid down his life—to 
enforce on others maxims he did not himself 
obey. The theory is the most insane of para- 
doxes! 

It is usual to wrap up this theory in soft 
words, to hang round it a nimbus of polite 
generalities. No one will put it in plain speech. 
Those who contend in the loudest tones that 
Christ was a man, on the same level of nature 
with all other men, are yet eager to adorn him 
with compliments. They vie with his most de- 
voted followers in ascribing every virtue to him. 
He was the highest and noblest of men. 

But if Christ had no other than a human 
consciousness—if he knew himself to be only a 
man at the moment he claimed to be infinitely 
more than man, there is no room for compli- 
ments. A man talking in Christ’s accents, mak- 
ing Christ’s claims, uttering Christ’s promises, 
assuming Christ’s attitude to the rest of his 
race, is, it must be repeated, the most stupen- 
dous impostor on record. 


CHRIST AN IMPOSTOR 195 


Where else can be found an example of 
claims so wild, made in tones so calm and as- 
sured? “Before Abraham was, I am.” “He 
that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath 
eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last 


399 


day.” If these words have not behind them a 
divine consciousness, and a divine authority, 
they are, it must be said afresh, either the wild- 
est lunacies, or they are the most extravagant, 
and, it may be added, the most meaningless im- 
posture to be discovered in history. From that 
conclusion there is literally no escape. 

But to state some charges is to refute 
them. Who would not treat it as a jest if asked 
to believe that behind Paradise Lost there was 
the brain of an idiot; that the imagination of a 
rogue gave birth to the Imitatio Christi; or 
that the appetites of swine created In Memo- 
riam? And to put the soul of a conscious im- 
postor behind the face of Christ, to trace the 
Sermon on the Mount to the vanity of a dis- 
eased intellect, to find the root of what is, on 
any theory as to its origin, the profoundest spir- 
itual teaching the race knows, in the arts of a 


196 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


rogue, the falsehood of a deceiver—this is a 
vaster folly still. 

Whatever is true, this cannot be! It is an 
incredibility so vast that to believe it requires a 
more stupendous effort of faith than the accept- 
ance of all the fables of the Talmud, or of King 
Arthur’s Round Table. 

We have thus got a step further. Christ cer- 
tainly existed. To doubt this is to quarrel with 
history. It were as reasonable to doubt whether 
Alexander existed, or Cesar, or Napoleon Bo- 
naparte. And accepting the fact that Jesus 
Christ existed, he cannot be set in the pillory 
of human scorn as an impostor. He must have 
believed in himself, and in what he claimed for 
himself. If any words that ever fell from hu- 
man lips ring with the accents of sincerity, they 
are his. So those who reject his divinity are 
driven to the theory that he was a pure-minded 
but self-deluded dreamer, who took himself 
seriously. He did not try to deceive the world. 
He deceived himself. 

This, however, is to save Christ’s honesty at 
the expense of his sanity. He believed in his 


CHRIST AN IMPOSTOR 197 


own miracles, though they never existed. He 
was able to describe himself as the “light of the 
world,” and he actually mistook himself for 
that light, when he was really an unlettered 
Jewish peasant, the head of a tiny Jewish sect. 
This is to say, as a matter of fact, that Jesus 
Christ is to be dismissed from consideration as 
a lunatic. Only under the roof of a lunatic 
asylum is such language as his found on merely 
human lips. Those who deny the divinity of 
Jesus Christ ought to have the courage of their 
logic. They ought to be prepared to sign a 
certificate of lunacy for Jesus Christ! 

Yet who, not being himself a lunatic, would 
put his name to such a certificate? In the whole 
compass of human literature, where is speech 
to be found shining with the pure white radi- 
ance of perfect reason in an equal degree with 
the teachings of Jesus Christ? In all recorded 
human thinking, whose thoughts move with a 
flight so steady, and in a realm so high, as his? 
The homely speech of Socrates himself has not 
more of the salt of reason; the philosophy of 
Plato is not so serenely luminous. The wisest 


198 Tue BreLieFs OF UNBELIEF 


in every generation since he was born sit at his 
feet to learn; the saintliest stand rebuked be- 
fore his purity. 

If a plebiscite of the human race were taken, 
would a single vote be cast in favor of the 
theory that Jesus Christ was either an impostor 
—oramadman? If sucha vote were cast, the 
owner of it would find no hole into which he 
could creep and hide himself from the contempt 
of mankind. 


COMA PE RGILTL 


THE THEORY THAT CHRIST 18s ONLY A Mytu 


You have to account for a man born in the imagination 
of some other man, and who, as a creature of imagination, 
has risen to the supreme place in human history, and who 
today rules innumerable millions of human lives and ministries 
and destinies. It is easy to call him and his work mythical, 
romantic, fabulous, but that does not account for the profound 
moral influence, the beneficent results, and the whole ministry 
that is represented by the term “Christ.”—-Dr. Parker, The 
People’s Bible; Matthew, p. 386. 


So far, the doubts about Christ—which are 
only positive creeds disguised—the direct alter- 
natives to belief in his divinity can be shown, 
one by one, to be incredible. He actually ex- 
isted. He was not a shameless and conscious 
impostor. He was not a lunatic. The Sermon 
on the Mount did not find its cradle in a dis- 
eased brain, and the parables of Christ are not 
the reflex of a disordered mind. 

There remains, as an alternative to Christian 
faith, and as a positive creed about Christ, only 


one theory which is so much as thinkable. He 
199 


200 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


was a beautiful character, half mystic, half 
poet, and whole dreamer; “a beautiful but in- 
effectual angel,” to quote Max Gohre, “beating 
in the void his luminous wings in vain.” He 
lived a life so blameless, and yet so pathetic, 
that it has seized the imagination of the race; 
and round it, as the centuries pass, there has 
naturally and inevitably gathered a world of 
touching myths. The Gospels are to be read 
with pitying and respectful tenderness as the 
records of a beautiful delusion; a dream which 
has solidified into a myth, or a group of myths. 

Christ was not responsible for these myths. 
He did not invent them. They simply gathered 
—a sort of shining poetic dew—about his 
memory. He is thus to be regarded as the 
unconscious human kernel to a cloud of rose- 
colored fables—fables born of superstition, or 
imagination, and which have hardened with the 
process of time into something that resembles 
history. 

Just as amber gathers round some accidental 
substance—a straw, or a fly—and embalms it, 
wraps it in perfume, makes it imperishable, so 


CHRIST ONLY A MytH 201 


the dreams and the superstitions of the race 
have gathered round Jesus Christ. He is a but- 
terfly who, in this way, has been transformed 
into a jewel. 

This is an explanation of Christ which al- 
lows the skeptic to be polite to him, or even to 
admire him, while yet dismissing his claims as 
so much idle vapor. 

But to this theory some very obvious and 
fatal criticisms apply. We are asked to regard 
the Sermon on the Mount, the story of the 
miracles, the matchless tragedy of the betrayal 
and the agony and the cross, as forms of crys- 
tallized superstition. Now, human superstition 
is an ignoble thing, intellectually lower than 
philosophy or poetry. And yet, on this theory, 
it has done what philosophy or poetry could 
never accomplish. It has given birth to con- 
ceptions which have not merely colored the life 
of the world; they have ennobled that life. 
They have transfigured to a new pattern the 
civilizations in which the life of the race ex- 
presses itself. They are doing it still, though 
the superstitions from which they come have 


202 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


been exposed and renounced. This, surely, is 
the last of incredibilities. 

It is more plausible, perhaps, to describe the 
story of Christ as the crystallized imagination, 
rather than the concrete superstition of the 
race. Out of that imagination has been evolved 
the dream—the poet’s vision—of a perfect life; 
a life untouched by the evil of the world, the 
ideal of what every man might wish himself to 
be. And picturesque traditions, and more or 
less plausible dogmas, have grown naturally 
from this dream, or have been attracted to it. 
So we get the radiant, but imaginary figure of 
Jesus Christ, a myth born of the dreaming 
human imagination. And this theory, it may 
be claimed, at least does not insult Christ. 

But “imagination” is not a vague, diffused 
element—say, like gravitation—a homeless 
force which operates everywhere, but finds its 
center nowhere. It is a personal quality, the 
endowment of some single intellect. Now, if 
Christ—the Christ of the church’s faith—did 
not exist, but is the creation of the human mind, 
the question arises, of whose imagination is he 


Curist ONLY A MytTH 203 


the child? What nameless Shakespeare—or 
procession of Shakespeares—invented him, and 
equipped him with a story so wonderful, teach- 
ing so profound, a philosophy so lofty? <A 
geometrical progression with a cipher for its 
starting point is a sufficiently startling concep- 
tion; and if Christianity is such a progression, 
the puzzle arises: “Who was the unknown in- 
ventor of that amazing cipher which, being 
nothing, has yet yielded a sum total so stupen- 
dous ?” 

For this is a “myth” which to this very day 
has in it an energy as of dynamite. It turned 
the group of Christ’s immediate disciples—who 
were visibly commonplace men—into forces 
which have affected the history of the race 
more profoundly than any of the memorable 
figures in war, or statesmanship, or science, or 
philosophy that can be named. “The men who 
have turned the world upside down,” is the 
description of their alarmed contemporaries ; 
and the men who thus changed the very order 
of society are Peter, who denied his Lord; Paul, 
who persecuted his followers; John and James, 


204. Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


with their companions, who fled from him at 
the moment of his arrest. But they recovered 
their faith in Christ, and the recovery trans- 
formed them into human forces without paral- 
lel in human history! 

We know what is possible in the way of 
creation to the human imagination. Shake- 
speare is its high-water mark, so far as the 
English-speaking race is concerned. But who 
could suppose one of the imaginary characters 
created by his genius—say, Hamlet or Titania 
—stepping off the stage—turning all history, 
indeed, into a stage for itseli—creating a new 
literature of its own, vaster than its own author 
was able to create for himself; reshaping civil- 
ization, giving a new standard to duty, evolv- 
ing martyrs, inspiring saints, putting hymns on 
countless lips, building ten thousand places of 
worship! And we are asked to believe that 
the “imagination” of some dreamer, a com- 
pound of rogue and lunatic, using the figure of 
a Jewish peasant as its raw material, has per- 
formed this miracle! This would be a greater 
wonder than any recorded in the four Gospels. 


CHRIST ONLY A MyTH 205 


It may be added that this particular “myth” 
is burdened with a special incredibility. For 
the mythologies of Greece and Rome, or of 
Eastern lands, the notion of an incarnation, or 
of many incarnations, was easy. But to the 
Jews, and to the faith of the Jewish people, the 
idea was abhorrent. They sent Christ, as a 
matter of fact, to his death for claiming to be 
the Son of God. The Jewish mind, whatever 
other element of religious faith it had lost, still 
kept possession of the doctrine of the unity of 
God; and that doctrine, as Jewish thought in- 
terpreted it, was in utter hostility to the very 
notion of an incarnation. And to explain the 
Christian doctrine of the incarnation as a myth 
generated in the brains of half a dozen Jewish 
fishermen—this is an incredibility greater than 
the incarnation itself. 

It is clear, again, that no single intellect is 
concerned with the invention of the fable—if 
it be a fable—on which Christianity is built. 
A whole procession of dreamers and rogues, 
scattered over a period of many years and an 
area of many lands, must have been engaged 


206 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


in the process. Now, the notion of the com- 
posite authorship of the Iliad was killed by the 
argument that it was easier to believe in one 
Homer than in a dozen; and the suggestion, 
it may be added, that no Homer ever existed, 
may fitly enough be killed by the consideration 
that somebody who, not being Homer, invented 
him, and wrote the Iliad for him, would be a 
vastly more astonishing person than Homer 
himself. 

But if we reject the notion of an historic 
Christ, a real Person, who spoke the words and 
performed the deeds described in the four Gos- 
pels, then we have to believe in the existence of 
an unknown number of forgotten geniuses, of 
nameless poets and unrecorded Shakespeares, 
who conspired to produce the character of 
Jesus. They invented his history, forged his 
parables; and, though acting without concert 
with each other, have produced an absolutely 
harmonious conception. 

For no harmony known to music 1s more per- 
fect than the harmony of qualities which make 
up the character of Christ, as painted in the 


Curist ONLY A MyTH 207 


Gospels. And wrought into the beautifully 
simple story and character of Christ are mean- 
ings and truths the race masters only slowly, 
and has not, even yet, mastered fully. The 
character thus invented resembles, as a matter 
of fact, a record in cipher. Generation after 
generation spells out some new syllable of the 
cipher, and so the revelation grows; but always 
it is self-consistent, and always it is in advance 
of the highest thought straining to interpret it. 

Here is something without parallel in litera- 
ture: a character so noble in conception, so 
pure in teaching, so profound and sustained in 
its influence that it has changed the story of 
the world. Today it kindles the worship, and 
colors the lives of countless multitudes. 

And that the conception of such a character 
is the work of a committee of unknown rogues 
—of rogues without any intelligible motive, 
who belonged to different ages and worked 
without concert or common plan—this, surely, 
is a theory no sane mind can accept. It over- 
taxes human credulity. 

When we are told, moreover, that Christ is 


208 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


simply an accidental human center to an equally 
accidental collection of myths it is worth while 
to remember that even a myth needs an expla- 
nation. It has its own laws and limitations. 

What may be called the natural history of 
myths is quite intelligible. Like certain fungoid 
growths, they need a special atmosphere for 
their development. They grow rankly in the 
darkness. Light kills them as it kills some 
microbes. 

Now, it is certain that no such atmosphere 
lies about the birth of Christianity. It did not 
arise in a dim and remote antiquity when fables 
came easily into birth. Christ was born more 
than four centuries after Plato. His cradle 
stands in the very center of what is known as 
the “Golden Age’ of Roman literature. Pliny 
was twenty-three years old when the angels 
sang the first Christmas “Adeste’; Juvenal 
was born seven years after the crucifixion; 
Seneca’s epistles are contemporary with those 
of Saint Paul: 

A generation which saw Augustus on the 
throne, which had Tacitus for historian, and 


CHRIST ONLY A MyTH 209 


Juvenal for poet and satirist, was certainly not 
credulous or superstitious. It was a wearied 
and skeptical age. It had tried every experi- 
ment, exhausted every pleasure, stripped itself 
of every belief. Such an age is as unfavor- 
able to the evolution of myths as an acid solu- 
tion is to the growth of weeds. 

Myths, again, need much time for their evo- 
lution. A human figure must grow dim and 
vague from mere distance; close personal 
knowledge—the knowledge that disillusionizes 
—must perish before a nimbus of myths can 
gather about it. As no man can be a hero to 
his valet, so no man with the limitations of his 
kind can be glorified and vaporized into a myth 
while his contemporaries live. But Christ came 
to his full estate in the belief of his followers 
almost at a single step. Paul’s letters are the 
final proof of this. They were written within 
less than thirty years of the crucifixion, and 
are the earliest and most authentic of Christian 
documents. They are admitted by the highest 
critical authorities to be genuine. And in these 
letters Christ emerges full-statured and divine, 


210 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


with the faith concerning him as clear-cut as a 
cameo, as definite as a steel die. Less than 
thirty years after the Roman whips had 
scourged him and the Roman soldiers cast lots 
for his garments, Christ stands revealed in 
these letters, the world’s Redeemer—exactly as 
he stands today, after twenty centuries have 
gone. 

Paul, it must be remembered, was not a nar- 
row-brained fanatic, an enthusiast careless of 
logic. He was a scholar, a thinker, one of the 
great intellects of the race. He has made a 
deeper impress on history than Cesar or 
Shakespeare. His philosophy touches a higher 
note than that of Socrates; his moral teaching 
is of a more practical fiber than that of Marcus 
Aurelius. He is the most impressive witness 
as to the person of Christ that can be put in 
the box, and nothing can be more absolute and 
decisive than his testimony. 

He not only believes, on the authority of an 
amazing personal experience, in the resurrec- 
tion of Christ; he remembers and numbers the 
witnesses who saw the risen Saviour. No belief 


Curist ONLY A MytTu 2rI 


can be more confident, and no teaching about 
Christ more definite or positive in character, 
than his. We are justified, he declares, by his 
grace. The race is put into a new relationship 
with God by his incarnation. All men are to 
stand at his judgment seat. Not to love him 
is to be anathema maranatha. 

We are not called at this point to discuss 
whether these teachings are true or not; they 
at least prove that the figure of Jesus Christ 
cannot be classed as a myth. It stands, as 
seen by his contemporaries, and in the light of 
that first generation, exactly as it does today 
after twenty centuries have passed. 

Myths, again, if they are easily evolved, are 
easily slain. Time is cruel to them. Science 
is fatal. Mere increase of knowledge kills 
them, as light destroys certain low forms of 
life. But the “myth” of Jesus Christ has sur- 
vived the passage of two thousand years, and 
stands undissolved in the white light of the 
twentieth century. 

This statement, indeed, is inadequate. The 
story of Christ satisfies the demands of science 


212 Ture BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


by gathering to itself an ever more triumphant 
verification, born of that final test of any creed, 
the test of actual human experience. For the 
gospel of Jesus Christ, it must be remembered, 
is not a philosophy; it is not a collection 
of legends and poems. It has a philosophy, 
indeed, nobler than the schools of Athens or of 
Rome ever heard, and poems sweeter than any 
Homer or Virgil ever sang. But it does not 
pretend to be a mere form, no matter how 
stately and noble, of literature. It is a statute 
book, and has the functions of a statute book. 


b 


“The question,” says Bacon, “is to be settled 
not by argument but by trying.” And men— 
generation after generation—have actually 
“tried” Christ’s laws, and find that they work. 

It might be possible to wrangle indefinitely 
over the symbols which make up a chemical 
formula; but science accepts the test of the 
laboratory as final. If every chemist who puts 
together the elements in the formula produces 
the same solution, what room is left for doubt? 
And the test of the validity of Christ’s teaching 
lies near at hand and within every man’s reach. 


Curist ONLY A MyTH 213 


It isa rule of life. It has for everyday affairs 
the office of chart and compass and nautical 
almanac to the seaman. 

Imagine a sea captain being told that his 
compass was a cheat, his chart an idle picture, 
his nautical almanac a collection of myths! He 
would not attempt to defend the methods of his 
art by syllogisms. “I have sailed by compass 
and chart for forty years,” he would say, ‘“‘and 
they have brought me to port.” What logic 
can be simpler, or what proof more absolute? 


GHA E LER Dy 


CONTRASTED CREEDS 


I esteem the Gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there 
shines forth from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity 
proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ of so divine a kind 
as only the divine could ever have manifested on earth.— 
GoETHE, Conversations with Eckermann, ili, p. 371. 

Either God has thus finally spoken, or there is no God, 
and man is the incomprehensible creation of chance and the 
sport of the chance that created him.—Pore’s Theology, vol. 
i, p. 61. 


In this list, thus briefly discussed, all the 
visible alternatives to the accepted faith about 
Christ are compressed. They confront each 
other. They challenge the verdict of every 
man’s reason. They put the general human 
conscience on its trial. Some choice betwixt 
them is instant, urgent, inevitable. And which 
of them can for a moment compare, not merely 
for credibility, but for sanity, with the general 
faith of the Christian Church? 

To say that Christ never existed is a suf- 


ficiently positive creed. But to undertake to 
214 


CONTRASTED CREEDS 215 


explain Christianity without Christ is a per- 
formance which can only kindle intellectual 
contempt. “It is of no use,” to quote Mill once 
more, “to say that Christ as exhibited in the 
Gospels is not historical.” It is “of no use” 
because the history of twenty centuries makes 
such a denial idle. To say, again, that he ex- 
isted, but was a self-conscious impostor, is an 
offense to reason almost greater. It is to say 
that the one effective religion the world knows 
had its cradle in the brain of a rogue. 

To say that Christ was a blameless dreamer 
—a dreamer with the general limitations of the 
race, and the special limitations of the age in 
which he lived, round whom the human imagi- 
nation has hung an accidental garment of 
myths—is again a definite and intelligible 
creed. But it argues a greater miracle than is 
to be found within the covers of the Bible. This 
belief clothes that vague thing, imagination— 
the imagination of nobody in particular, the 
general unowned imagination of mankind— 
with a power of noble and sustained creation 
beyond all the writers and thinkers and poets 


216 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


the race has ever produced. It is like saying 
that Cologne Cathedral had no particular 
architect, and was built on no specific plan. 
The vague “imagination” of the nameless hut- 
dwelling crowd, among whom it rose, pro- 
duced it. 

Any one of these theories about Jesus Christ 
is an offense to plain reason. But it may be 
asked, “How do these alternative creeds—these 
rivals to the Christian faith—affect morality? 
Do they carry with them any ethical results? 
And, if so, what is their nature?” 

The answer is that if they stained through to 
the imagination, and captured the belief of the 
race, they would profoundly shake the very 
foundations on which morality stands. 

If the race suddenly became convinced that 
Christ never existed, all that Christianity 
means would perish. The one effective system 
of ethics the race knows would be canceled. 
Morality itself would be discredited. Here is 
a moral code, it would be argued, which has 
emerged from nothing, which has meant noth- 
ing, but which has somehow for ages cheated 


CONTRASTED CREEDS 217 


the intellect and enslaved the conscience of 
mankind. All codes as a result would grow 
suspect. 

What effect on the world’s morality would 
be produced, again, by the discovery that 
Christ was an impostor? The one figure which 
the race had agreed to accept as its highest 
ideal of goodness suddenly proved to be a 
cheat, a dissembler, a rogue plus a pious mask 
—who shall measure the moral disaster of such 
a discovery? It would mean the instant and 
universal wreck of conscience! Goodness it- 
self might well be hated, since what had been 
adored for twenty centuries as its most perfect 
embodiment turned out to be only a veil cover- 
ing the face of a lie. In the same way the dis- 
covery that Christ was nothing better than a 
myth would go far to resolve morality itself 
into a myth. 

These are not arguments for continuing to 
believe in Christianity in spite of all disproof, 
but they may justly enough serve to make us 
hate the theories which, without any such dis- 
proof, would wreck the moral ideals of the race, 


218 Ture BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


and turn the highest conception of Goodness 
which has ever broken upon human vision into 
an imposture. This, surely, is not only a sin 
against the Holy Ghost but a sin against the 
human race. 

No! the saints and martyrs of all the Chris- 
Han centuries have not been deceived. The 
deepest experiences of so many generations of 
godly men and women are not a delusion. 
Christ’s great words about himself are true. 
He is the Light of the world. He is the eternal 
Word made flesh. He is a Force that draws all 
men unto himself. Above the wrecks of all op- 
posing theories, and calm with all the peace of 
the stars, the Christian faith about Christ rises, 
like some soaring mountain peak—stately, 
strong, unshakable. It is buttressed with cliffs 
of granite, and white with unstained snows. 
The theories that would overthrow it are like 
the low huts, the insect-haunted scrub at its 
base. 


BOOK III 
THE BIBLE 


219 


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THE CHRISTIAN FAITH ABOUT 
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CLONE ie hal 


THE PUZZLE OF THE BIBLE 


The Bible is a book which man could not have written if 
he would, and would not have written if he could. Henry 
ROGERS. 

If an inhabitant of another planet were to visit our sphere, 
and should ask to see the most significant, victorious, and 
precious object now known to man, I, for one, should un- 
hesitatingly show him the Bible.—JosErH Cook. 


The Bible, as seen by Christian faith, is not a 
book of speculations and guesses, a book which 
represents the groping of the human mind 
after God. It is a revelation—a discovery God 
has made of himself to man. It is the statute 
book of the human race. There is a revelation 
of God in nature and in secular history. But 
language is the fundamental distinction be- 
twixt man and the beasts. It is the Rubicon, to 
quote Max Miiller, on the hither side of which 
men alone are found. “Man is man,” says 
Humboldt, “only through speech.” And it was 


223 


224 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


fitting that God, who has bestowed on us this 
great faculty of language, should make the 
highest disclosure of himself through that 
channel. 

But if we consider the literary form through 
which these high offices are fulfilled, the Bible 
can only be described as a paradox, the dis- 
appointment of all human expectation. To look 
at, it is a book of scraps; a planless cluster of 
pamphlets, representing the literature of the 
most unliterary of nations. Here are sixty-six 
booklets of the most diverse character, some of 
them of unknown, some of doubtful, author- 
ship, scattered thinly over sixteen centuries. 
They are made up of biographies, hymns, epi- 
sodes of tribal history, laws of a social system 
which no longer exists, genealogies of men in 
whom nobody is interested, letters to churches 
dead for centuries, tales of old, far-off, forgot- 
ten things, and battles long ago. One book is 
an Eastern love story; another is an episode in 
Persian history which has not the name of God 
in it; yet another is the letter carried by an 
escaped slave who was being sent back to his 


THE PuzzLEe OF THE BIBLE 225 


master; yet another is a collection of proverbs 
of the “Poor Richard” order. 

Sixty-six pamphlets, written without concert 
by a scattered line of unknown men, and pre- 
served, we hardly know how, packed with mys- 
teries, full of what seem insignificant or irrele- 
vant details. And yet this Book is the greatest 
literary possession of the race, the enduring 
revelation of God to man. It constitutes the 
title deeds of Christian institutions. It is the 
lesson book of Christian faith, the final code of 
human conduct. “We have no other Christian 
says Dr. Pope, “than that which is 
one with its documents and records. The char- 


3 


religion,’ 


acter of Christianity is the character of the 
Bible.” 

If asked to describe in advance what the 
Bible of the human race should be, certainly no 
one would have guessed this particular form. 
“Might we not easily have had,” it is natural 
to ask, “a book with fewer mysteries and di- 
gressions, a book that left nothing untold, that 
could be demonstrated like a proposition in 
Euclid, and which no higher critics could dis- 


226 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


solve into a mist of wavering dates?” A reve- 
lation given to all, given simultaneously, and 
given adequately: this is what seems to be 
needed. 

Let us imagine a committee of philosophers 
—or of poets, or lawyers, or historians, or 
newspaper editors—employed to draw up in 
advance a plan for a Bible. It is highly prob- 
able, of course, that such a committee would 
never have agreed among themselves; but it is 
certain that if they had, they would have given 
us a Bible quite unlike that it has pleased God 
to bestow. 

The lawyers would have given us a code, 
the theologians a catechism, the philosophers a 
volume of metaphysics. A committee of news- 
paper editors would have provided for us an 
“up-to-date” book, all ‘“cross-heads” and sen- 
sations and picturesque descriptions. The poets 
would have given us an epic embroidered with 
sonnets. The scientists would have made 
science itself unnecessary by preparing us a 
compendium of all knowledge, the natural 
history of things in general, a book which 


THE PUZZLE OF THE BIBLE 22% 


would have left the planet without a secret, 
and the human intellect with nothing to inter- 
est it. 

All of them would have insisted on a library 
instead of a simple book. For consider the 
scale on which uninspired human literature is 
planned. Hodder’s Life of the Earl of Shaftes- 
bury—to take the first book on the shelf—con- 
tains some three hundred and sixty thousand 
words. Mr. Morley writes the Life of Glad- 
stone on a still ampler scale, in two stupendous 
volumes. But for the life of Christ we have 
four thin pamphlets no bigger than tracts. 
Matthew tells the amazing story in twenty- 
three thousand words; Mark, in fifteen thou- 
sand words. When we remember how many 
volumes Kinglake takes to describe a third-rate 
war which settled nothing, and what space 
Macaulay requires to tell the tale of only six 
years of British history, what a stupendous 
book—or library of books— a committee of un- 
inspired editors would require to tell the whole 
story of the planet, and of the religious history 
of the human race! The Bible that the human 


228 Tuer BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


mind would have invented is something to 
meditate over. 

And yet this amazing book, that affronts all 
expectation, that seems, in literary form, to be 
utterly unfitted for the great offices of a Bible, 
has influenced the imagination of the world, 
and the history of the race, not only more than 
any other book that can be named but more 
than all other books put together. It has deter- 
mined—or is visibly determining—the morality 
of the race. Nations live by it, or die by quar- 
reling with it. This tiny collection of Hebrew 
books not only lies on every pulpit lid in Chris- 
tendom, it is the shaping force in human affairs 
everywhere. 

Theodore Parker was by no means an ortho- 
dox Christian, but he had a touch of true spir- 
itual genius, and of the insight which spiritual 
genius gives; and his testimony to the Bible is a 
classic. The sun, he says, never sets on its 
gleaming page. It goes to the castle of the 
king and the cottage of the peasant. It colors 
the talk of the street, it is woven into the web of 
universal literature. It talks to us in our soli- 


THE PuzzLE oF THE BIBLE 220 


tude, consoles our grief, rebukes our baseness, 
gives new ideals to our conscience. The aching 
head finds a softer pillow when the Bible lies 
underneath it. This book blesses us when we 
are born, gives names to half Christendom, 
adds a sanctity to the marriage tie, writes an 
inscription of hope on the graves of the dead. 
“Our best of uttered prayers,’ says Theodore 
Parker, “are in its storied speech wherewith 
our fathers and the patriarchs prayed. Men 
who believe nothing else that is spiritual believe 
the Bible all through.” 

Generation after generation arises, each 
with its separate ideals and needs, each with its 
own language. The literature of yesterday is 
not the literature of today. Famous books go 
out of fashion, and are read only by scholars 
and antiquarians. But this immortal book is 
the contemporary of all ages. It talks in the 
speech, and with the accents of each generation 
in turn. The silver cord of the Bible is not 
loosed nor its golden bowl broken as centuries 
slip by, like beads on the thread of time. The 
Bible, says Theodore Parker, is the master of 


230 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


the soul, wiser than reason, truer than con- 
science, greater and more trustworthy than the 
religious instinct itself. 

The scale on which it is perpetually multi- 
plied is only one proof of the stupendous force 
of the Bible. One English society alone has 
translated it into four hundred languages, and 
prints six million copies of it annually. This 
tiny volume, moreover—the work of nameless 
men, and, taken humanly, the annals of a per- 
ished race—has somehow created a vaster liter- 
ature about itself than any other book that can 
be named. No other book has called into exist- 
ence—for attack, for defense, for illustration, 
for proof, and for disproof—so many volumes. 
The sixty-six pamphlets which make it up are, 
in mass, about one-three-hundredth part of ex- 
tant Greek and Roman literature; works which, 
taken intellectually, are the classics of all time. 
Yet the Bible has given birth to a vaster litera- 
ture than all the Greek and Roman classics put 
together, and yet is not itself submerged. It 
rises high above the literature devoted to its 
exposition like the oak above the leaves of last 


THE PUZZLE OF THE BIBLE 231 


year’s spring. “The little ark of Jewish litera- 
ture,’ says Henry Rogers, “floats upon the 
surges of time, while the wrecked archives of 
huge Oriental empires are turned into mere 
flotsam and jetsam.” 

How often this book has been torn to rags, 
refuted, destroyed! But the anvil outlasts all 
the hammers that smite it. The men who at- 
tack the Bible, the volumes written to disprove 
it, are forgotten, while the immortal Book lives 
on. The Bible, too, survives its friends as well 
as its enemies. The Psalms have outlived Tate 
and Brady, Sternhold and Hopkins. The his- 
tories of the Bible are cut into fragments by the 
dissecting knives of scholars, and yet, some- 
how, they keep the unity that belongs to life. 
Some strange gift of indestructible life is hid- 
den in this volume. History is strewn with the 
wrecks of a hundred perished literatures; but 
time has no destroying office for the biblical 
records. Great nations are only remembered, 
indeed, as embalmed in them. ‘Some nations 
and empires,’ says Henry Rogers, “are not 
forgotten, only because the Bible has occasion 


232 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


to mention them.” Some element not born of 
human genius, but which outshines genius, lies 
in its pages. Other books have their day and 
they die. Their language grows obsolete. The 
world’s thought runs in new channels, and they 
are left mere stranded wrecks on time’s shore. 
But this book belongs to all the centuries, and 
outlives them all. 

“A planless book,” a “book of scraps,’ men 
call it. And yet it has the indestructible unity 
which life alone gives. If tried only as a poem 
is tried, and by purely literary tests, the Bible 
is a great epic, with the unity of plan that be- 
longs to an epic. It has a lost paradise at the 
beginning, a paradise regained at the end, with 
a divine redeeming process running through 
thousands of years, linking both visions to- 
gether. One sublime idea shines behind the 
many books of the Bible. It is the recovery of 
a fallen race; the rebuilding of the kingdom of 
God in human life. And the instrument of this 
great process is Jesus Christ. The Bible is 
nothing but a frame of historical events in 
which Christ is set. All the early books of the 


THE PUZZLE OF THE BIBLE 258 


Bible prepare for him, whisper of him, point to 
him; all the later books look back to him. Un- 
der all its forms the Bible is thus the servant 
of one idea. 

And the unity which is thus revealed, it must 
be repeated, is the product of human elements 
which seem in utter discord with each other. 
Here is an unknown number of writers, be- 
longing to different races, born under different 
skies, parted by centuries from each other, with 
no common plans, and most of them visibly 
without any notion that what they write is to be 
part of the Bible of the human race. These are 
the elements not of unity, but of discord. 

Imagine sixty-six compositors scattered over 
the world, each man setting up some solitary 
word, without any knowledge of what the other 
sixty-five were to produce. And lo! the sixty- 
six words when put together fall into what may 
be called lyrical relations with each other. 
They make not merely an intelligent sentence, 
but a poem, with linked sweetness of rhythm, 
and chiming harmonies; a poem of which the 
sense is not only clear, but rises to one sublime 


234 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


climax. Could anything less than a miracle 
produce the rhythm of a perfect sonnet from 
a number of words set up independently? 
There must be a single controlling Mind be- 
hind the words to explain the poem. 

Or, to vary the figure, the Bible is a portrait. 
The face of Christ looks out, tender, pure, di- 
vine, if with varying clearness, from every 
page. Is it credible that sixty-six chance daubs, 
of chance colors, made without agreement be- 
twixt themselves by a number of chance men, 
could produce a Face that arrests the attention, 
and stirs the love of the world: 

The Bible, tried by ordinary tests, is thus the 
great puzzle of all literature. What is the ex- 
planation of the puzzle? To give the answer of 
Christian faith in Christian terms, the secret of 
the Bible lies in the fact that it is not the prod- 
uct of human genius, it does not reflect the 
mind or record the discoveries of man. It re- 
flects the mind of God. It is a channel through 
which runs a stream of spiritual force. It is 
not a discovery but a revelation. It is, to use 
terms of theology, a divinely inspired book. 


THE PUZZLE OF THE BIBLE oor 


About the inspiration of the Bible there are 
many theories and many perplexities. The no- 
tion of a mechanical inspiration, a force which 
blotted out the individuality of the writers, and 
used them as unconscious pens—mere pipes 
through which the divine stream flowed—is 
not necessary to Christian faith, and is not, as 
a matter of fact, held by any large section of 
the Christian Church. 

A verbal inspiration, coextensive with the 
Bible, is unnecessary for the ends of the Bible, 
and is inconsistent with the facts of the Bible. 
Such an inspiration would be useless to us to- 
day; for if it was given to the original docu- 
ments of Scripture, it is canceled by the fact 
that these have long since perished. It is dis- 
credited by the fact that there is in the Bible 
visibly no great care taken to insure an exact 
verbal uniformity in different reports of the 
same event. When the four evangelists give 
some memorable saying of Christ, each one re- 
cords it with some slight variation of details 
and phraseology. There are variations in the 
reports of some of the most solemn words ut- 


236 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


tered by Christ, such, for example, as the 
words employed in the Last Supper. The 
records, it is true, are absolutely uniform in 
spirit and meaning: the variations only prove 
the independency of the writers. 

A verbal inspiration governing every word of 
the Bible is discredited, again, by the fact that, 
while there are some two hundred and sixty- 
three direct quotations from the Old Testament 
in the New Testament, scarcely any one of 
these is verbally accurate. “It has not pleased 
God,” says Dr. Pope, “to bind up his eternal 
truth absolutely and inseparably for good and 
evil in documents which perish in the using.” 

What the general faith of the Christian 
Church holds is the plenary inspiration of 
Scripture; an inspiration which, when neces- 
sary, is verbal, but which always is sufficient to 
insure the full and accurate conveyance of the 
truth to be revealed. 

This divine element in the Bible explains that 
strange and separate note of tranquil certainty 
which runs through it. It does not argue, it 
announces. It is not concerned to prove the 


THE PuzzLE OF THE BIBLE Bar 


foundation truths of religion, the existence and 
holiness of God, the eternal authority of right- 
eousness, the moral nature of man, the fact of 
sin, and of a redemption from sin, the final 
judgment that awaits all human deeds. It as- 
sumes these truths; it proclaims them. They 
are not matters for debate; they are not to be 
justified by anxious syllogisms. They are cer- 
tainties, certainties that find their attestation in 
the soul itself. The Bible, in a word, offers us 
not a philosophy or an argument, but a mes- 
sage. Its accent is not that of a human teacher 
catching the broken vision of truths far off and 
dimly seen, and striving to utter and prove 
them. The note is always one of authority; its 
accent that of a divine revelation, not of a hu- 
man discovery. 

The force in the Bible we call inspiration 
explains, again, the indestructible power of the 
book; a power of which the writers themselves 
were unconscious, and which certainly cannot 
be accounted for by any genius in them. No 
one can pretend that a handful of untaught 
Jews—herdsmen, fishermen, peasants—out- 


2.38 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


scale in intellectual literary power all the great 
names not only of Greek and Latin literature 
but of the literature of all races and of all ages. 
Who will compare, as far as natural genius is 
concerned, David with Homer, or John with 
Plato, or Peter with Marcus Aurelius? There 
was only one scholar and man of genius—Paul 
—in the group of New Testament writers. 

To take the personal and intellectual ele- 
ments in the writers and try to explain the 
Bible by them is like taking the dead wire, the 
metal switch, the loop of calcined fibers, which 
are the machinery of an electric lamp, and of- 
fering them as an explanation of the electric 
light itself. These things are but the channel 
of the subtle, invisible force running back into 
mystery, that we call electricity. When any- 
body can explain the electric light without an 
electric current then we may explain the Bible 
without a divine inspiration. Visibly there is 
something more in the book than there was in 
the men who wrote it, and this mysterious and 
magnificent plus is the divine energy we call 
inspiration. 


THE PUZZLE OF THE BIBLE 239 


And this has to be said about the Bible—this 
is too commonly the forgotten thing about it; 
its inspiration is not something lying far back 
in distant centuries when the books were first 
written. It is a fact in the present tense! It 
is a force affecting the readers of today as well 
as the writers of yesterday. For the man who 
reads it with believing eyes the Bible is still 
flooded from cover to cover with inspiration. It 
thrills in every syllable with more than ele- 
mental forces, forces which penetrate to the 
very heart of the reader and stir all its deeper 
emotions as the moon stirs the sea tides. Somr- 
THING is in the book which breaks out—now in 
one place, now in another—with pulses of spir- 
itual energy, gleams of unearthly light. It is 
as though first one cluster of words and then 
another become suddenly and strangely lumi- 
nous. For the devout soul the Bible is always a 
book of divinest magic. 


CG ERAPAPARGEL 


Tuer Locic oF THE BIBLE 


The Word of God is the book of the common people; it 
is the workingman’s book; it is the child’s book; it is the 
slave’s book; it is the book of every creature that is down- 
trodden; it is the book that carries with it the leaven of God’s 
soul; it is a book that tends to make men larger and better 
and sweeter, and that succors them all through life; and do 
you suppose it is going to be lost out of the world? When 
the Bible is lost out of the world it will be because there are 
no men in it who are in trouble and need succoring; no men 
who are oppressed and need release; no men who are in dark- 
ness and need light; no men who are hungry and need food; 
no men who are sinning and need mercy; no men who are lost 
and need the salvation of God.—HENry Warp BEECHER. 


Where shall we discover a logic wide and 
deep and lofty enough to justify Christian faith 
as to the Bible? There are a thousand proofs 
which professional apologists recite and array 
in scientific order: its survival through so many 
ages, its fulfilled prophecies, its profound 
agreement with history, its supremacy over all 
purely human literature, the miracles of yester- 


day which it records, and the miracles, also, of 
240 


THE Locic oF THE BIBLE 241 


today which it works. But an instructed Chris- 
tian would be content to risk the whole case of 
the Bible on three facts which are beyond all 
successful challenge. 

The first is the fact that the Bible is the one 
key which unlocks the puzzle of the world. Its 
interpretation of the spiritual history of the 
race is true. No other covers all the facts, no 
other is so much as thinkable. 

If we grasp the underlying meaning of the 
Bible, we shall see that it assumes to be the 
record of a great spiritual process, a process 
older than itself, wider than itself, and one still 
in operation. That great and divine process is 
the religious education of the race. And who 
looks at history in the light of this philosophy 
sees that beneath all outward events this is 
exactly what has taken place, and is taking 
place. God, by his spirit touching the spirits 
of men, by his providence shaping the lives of 
men, has from the beginning been leading the 
race to “a divine, far-off event,” and is still 
leading it. The process is a spiritual educa- 
tion; and human history is unintelligible, it 


242 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


lacks both plan and goal, it is an epic without 
either a law or a climax, except on this theory. 

Now, the lines of a moral evolution, a true 
spiritual education, shine clear in the history of 
the race. It begins with the first pair, placed in 
that fit scene for human childhood—a garden. 
The first lesson is that of obedience in its sim- 
plest terms, a single prohibition suited to what 
may be called the kindergarten stage of morals: 
“Don’t touch that fruit!’ as it might be ex- 
pressed. Whether this story is truth in the 
form of parable, or truth in the form of history, 
it is equally convincing. 

The lesson is not learned, the law is broken; 
the penalty is a lost paradise; and the first 
human pair come out—it is true, with a mys- 
terious and uncomprehended promise in their 
hands—but it is to have the old lesson repeated 
under new and sterner conditions. They have 
sinned. They have now to be taught what sin 
is, and what it costs—a bitter truth, to be 
learned only through suffering. And history 
must be the schoolmaster. 

Sin, it is shown, destroyed that first paradise; 


THE Locic or THE BIBLE 24.3 


it wrecks the first home; it goes on to corrupt 
the world, till God washes his earth clean with 
the flood, and starts the race afresh with a sin- 
gle family; a family who have the sign of hope 
shining in the skies above them, and one tre- 
mendous tradition, as to the cost of sin, behind 
them. 

But a new stage has been reached, and a new 
lesson has now to be learned; the race is to be 
purged of idolatry, and is to be taught the truth 
that lies at the root of all religion, that God is 
One, and that he is a Spirit. To us this seems 
to belong to the very alphabet of religion, for 
we are the heirs of uncounted centuries of reli- 
gious teaching; but to the race, and at the out- 
set, it was the most difficult of truths, learned 
only through long ages of discipline. Soa race 
has to be trained—trained by the lessons and 
sufferings of centuries—which shall be the 
channel and witness of this truth to the whole 
human family; and the divine method of doing 
this is visible in characters of light in the Bible. 

Abraham is chosen as a starting point. We 
have, in orderly succession, a trained man, a 


2A4 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


trained family, a trained nation, a nation whose 
history is to be the religious text-book of the 
world. The whole process is an evolution, and 
we see the chosen people—a people chosen for 
the service of the world, not for themselves— 
passing from one schoolroom to another. 

Egypt is a schoolroom; and for four hundred 
years the Israelites are in it, until a group of 
Bedouins and nomads has become a nation, a 
nation fused and welded into unity by suffering, 
and rich in civilized arts. They come out from 
Egypt through the drama of the ten plagues, 
ten shattering blows struck at all the towering 
shapes of Egyptian idolatry; and that memory 
of overthrown gods is part of the equipment of 
the Israelites for their great office. The desert 
is a school, with its flaming Mount—its law of 
the Ten Words— a great advance on the single 
prohibition of paradise—its sufferings, its 
chain of miraculous deliverances, its myste- 
rious tabernacle worship. 

Palestine, again, is a schoolhouse, a little 
land no bigger than Wales, but shut in on 
every side from foreign invasion. And here 


THE Locic OF THE BIBLE 24.5 


for nearly one thousand four hundred years 
the educational process goes on, fitting this peo- 
ple to be the channel of religious truths for the 
race. 

It must be remembered that the very lan- 
guage of religion had to be created. Its great 
ideas of God, and of the character of God, of 
sin and of righteousness, and of the deep and 
eternal divorce betwixt them, had to be made 
visible and articulate. It took two thousand 
years to root the doctrine of one God—a truth 
lying at the foundation of religion—in the 
human conscience; and before the process was 
complete, of the twelve tribes ten had perished 
or disappeared from human sight because they 
refused to learn that truth. 

Does this process, as recorded in the Bible, 
seem strangely and incredibly long? It is 
sufficient to reply that at the end of another 
two thousand years—in the twentieth century 
of Christian civilization—not one half of the 
human race has even yet learned that primary 
truth. In the British empire itself, the most 
Christian of states, three of its subjects out of 


246 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


every five are still idolaters. The resisting 
power of human nature to divine truth, the 
slowness with which that truth is assimilated, 
is fatally underestimated. 

The unhurrying development of this process 
is in harmony with God’s methods in other 
realms. He did not call the earth into exist- 
ence with a gesture; it had its beginning in 
some far-off fire mist, and has reached its pres- 
ent state under a law of secular and slow evolu- 
tion. Whole ages are hidden in every bit of 
chalk; the light of suns that shone uncounted 
centuries ago shines in the gas jet that lights 
the pages of this book. If the schoolhouse took 
so long to build, surely it is for an education 
which 1s to be on the same time scale. 

But when this primary doctrine that God is 
One—that he is holy, that his character is the 
reflex and the standard of duty—has been mas- 
tered by the one selected race, and is beginning 
to stain through from it to the general con- 
science of the world, then it is plain a new stage 
in the great educational process has been 
reached; and who looks at secular history at 


THE Locic oF THE BIBLE 247 


that moment will see in it a curious arrest and 
pause. It is visibly one of the supreme mo- 
ments of time. The civilization of the world is 
breaking down. Heathenism is bankrupt; 
Judaism itself is arrested. The race seems to 


stand 
. . . between two worlds: one dead, 


The other powerless to be born. 


Then Christ comes, and Judaism, like a de- 
cayed husk which once held a grain of wheat, 
a grain which has now germinated, dies. 

Now, this process, thus sketched in barest 
outline, is an interpretation of history which is 
intelligible, consistent, and which fits all the 
facts. What we see is a spiritual evolution, a 
process shaped on a single plan, and moving to 
a far-off and adequate goal. The human par- 
ties to it, it is true, are unconscious of the plan; 
but this is only one more proof of the fact that 
there is a Divine Mind behind the whole proc- 
ess. The plan, as a matter of fact, only be- 
comes visible through the cloud of obscuring 
events, as we look back upon it in the perspec- 
tive of many centuries. 


248 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


This is visibly the true reading of human 
history. No other covers all the facts. No 
other reveals one golden thread of intelligible 
purpose running through the darkness. It is 
the story of the race as the Bible alone gives it; 
and so the Bible is the key, the only key, to the 
history of the world. 

It is true that the record, as given in the 
Bible, is incomplete. It is only a book of what 
may be called samples, and the key to each 
separate book in the Bible itself is the ray of 
light it sheds on some part of the great process. 
God’s providence, for example, is illustrated in 
such books as Ruth and Esther. The evolution 
of a language for religion is clearly the end of 
the whole ritual of the Jewish temple. The 
book of Psalms shows the ferment of spiritual 
life stirring in men’s souls and uttering itself 
in lyrics of worship and aspiration. The Bible 
is unintelligible on any other reading than that 
here given: but so is human history. 

The writers of the Bible, to turn to a new 
argument, were not philosophers, but somehow 
they discovered the whole philosophy, both of 


THe Locic or THE BIBLE 249 


duty and happiness; and this is the second fact 
which serves as the very watermark of divinity 
in the Bible. The secret of a living morality, 
the one effective formula for human conduct, 
is found in its pages, and is found nowhere else 
in literature. 

What may be called the philosophy of a true 
morality is, as we now see it, sufficiently clear. 
It must have an adequate ideal as a standard; 
it must possess a sufficient spiritual energy as a 
driving force. In the Bible morality finds its 
sufficient ideal in the character of God, its 
effective energy in the love of God. 

Now, to a degree which is unrealized and 
forgotten, the Bible, at this point, stands apart 
from all the religions of the world. We might 
naturally expect to find the highest levels of 
non-Christian morality in Greece, the land of 
art and literature, the home of the race that 
has given to the world the great masterpieces 
of literature, whose language was the mother 
tongue of A‘schylus and Plato; or in Rome, 
with its august conception of law, and its 
capacity for government. 


250 THE BELiers oF UNBELIEF 


But in both Greece and Rome morality had 
no relation to religion, and did not even pre- 
tend to find any standard or sanction in the 
character of the gods. Morality was the busi- 
ness of the philosophers; religion, of the 
priests; and neither class meddled with the af- 
fairs that belonged to the other. Perhaps the 
subtlest and profoundest analysis of duty in 
Greek literature is supplied by Aristotle; and 
he does not even mention God as a factor in it! 
This, one might suggest, was fortunate for 
morality; for if all the divinities of Greece and 
Rome appeared in flesh and blood today, and 
performed the feats ascribed to them as gods 
and goddesses, they would be promptly handed 
over to the police. 

The complete divorce of morality and reli- 
gion is the characteristic of non-Christian 
faiths under every sky and in every age. A 
Greek philosopher was much occupied in dis- 
covering God and the Universal Cause; but, to 
quote Mosley,’ of all questions there was not 
one which could make less practical difference 


1Bampton Lectures, p. 76. 


Tue Locic oF THE BIBLE 251 


to the philosopher himself, or, in his view, to 
anybody else, than whether there was, or was 
not, a God. Nothing would have astonished 
him more than, when he had proved, in the lec- 
ture-hall, the existence of a God, to be told to 
worship him. “Worship Him!” he would have 
exclaimed; “worship what, worship how?” 
Men might uphold, in argument, an infinite 
abstraction; they could not worship it. The 
mythological hero was much better fitted for 
worship than the Universal Cause. He, at least, 
might be decently moral—if only in patches. 
The Brahmanism of India today is another 
example of this complete absence of any rela- 
tion betwixt human duty and the character of 
the gods. The Supreme Being of Brahmanism 
is, in the words of Mosley, “a characterless, im- 
personal essence, without action, without will.” 
He is the substratum of everything, but himself 
is nothing. The rank and file of Hindu gods 
are nothing less than vile. India expressly 
exempts Hindu temples from the law against 
obscene pictures and carvings. If enforced, 
it would dismantle half the temples in India. 


252 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Now, the worship of corrupt gods must 
poison all the wells of morality. But it is 
equally true, though not so readily recog- 
nized, that morality divorced from a personal 
God, himself the standard and guard of moral- 
ity, inevitably perishes. Phillips Brooks in one 
of his sermons asks us to imagine everything 
that belongs to the thought of God to be taken 
away, and to consider what must be the conse- 


b 


quence. “Either the conscience,’ he says, 
“would be swept away, unable to stand alone, 
and mankind become a race of devils, or else 
conscience, in its sore need, would reach out 
its hands in the darkness, and find for itself a 
religion.” 

Presently he goes on to say: “As when be- 
fore the sunrise millions of half-awakened par- 
ticles of air are filled with dim suspicions of the 
coming sun, there would grow up, in countless 
hearts, perhaps as a misgiving, perhaps as a 
hope, the thought that the impulse toward 
righteousness in them—the force we call con- 
science—was but the echo of the will of some 
great Power that stood for righteousness; and 


THE LoGic OF THE BIBLE 253 


conscience in its trouble would begin to guess 
at forgiveness. “She could not tell its meth- 
ods, she could not invent for herself the divine 
wonder of the cross; but, somehow, somewhere, 
she must hope that pardon and repair were 
waiting, and in the dim smoke of some altar 
she would send up her hope toward heaven 
for a God and Saviour.” 

Now, in the Bible the sun is risen. We have 
a spiritual reading of duty. We have first the 
doctrine of one God, a doctrine that after so 
many ages finds its reflex in the latest and 
surest conception of science, that the physical 
universe is a unit. This God, we next learn, 
is a Person; is himself of infinite righteous- 
ness; and human duty is but the reflex of his 
will. And duty, when thus set in relation to a 
personal God, himself of infinite righteousness, 
is seen to be measureless in range. It shuts 
round us with the insistent pressure of the 
atmosphere. It is lofty as the height of the 
heavens themselves, since it finds its law and 
pattern in the character of God. 

Then comes the crown of all revelation, the 


254 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


supreme inspiration of all duty. This God loves 
us; his love for us is expressed in mysterious 
suffering borne for us. [le takes our flesh, that 
he may set us an example of obedience. He 
dies in a mysterious partnership with the con- 
sequences of our disobedience that he may de- 
liver us. 

Here is the spiritual energy which consti- 
tutes the driving force of duty. Here is the 
supreme argument for the hate of sin. 

No one can deny that duty, as thus inter- 
preted, and as thus reinforced, is the one effec- 
tive formula of conduct for the race. And it 
is found alone in the Bible! True or false, the 
book offers to mankind the one solution of the 
supreme problem of human life. How did this 
little cluster of Jewish peasants discover what 
escaped all the sages and teachers of the most 
intellectual races in the world? The answer is, 
They did not discover it; it comes by revela- 
tion; and this revelation is found in the pages 
of the Bible. 

The third fact which proves the Bible to be 
divine is that, somehow, it holds the secret, it 


THe Locic oF THE BIBLE 258 


teaches the art, of happiness. The supreme end 
of the Bible, of course, is not enjoyment, but 
character. It treats happiness as one of the by- 
products of character. And its philosophy of 
happiness somehow works alike for the indi- 
vidual and for the race. Happiness is to be 
found in the laws the Bible teaches, and no- 
where else. 

There never has been a Golden Age in the 
stormy history of the human race; but one 
would arrive within the next twenty-four 
hours if the Bible suddenly became the univer- 
sal rule of action. At present it is only half 
understood and less than half assimilated. But 
what of happiness the troubled earth knows 
comes from those laws of conduct taught in the 
Bible. And if we track back to their origin 
what may be called the running sores of civil- 
ization—the inequalities of social condition, the 
hatred of class against class, the cruelties of a 
social order built not on brotherhood but on 
selfishness, the mistrust betwixt civilized na- 
tions which finds expression in ever-expanding 
fleets and armies, the vices that blacken the life 


256 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


of the world as with fire and waste it as with 
famine—each of these will be found to spring 
from some latent or open discord with the 
teachings of the Bible. Each would be healed 
if that tragical discord were hushed. 

Let there be imagined one city on earth built 
absolutely on Christ’s teaching, with brother- 
hood linking class to class, the Golden Rule 
the foundation of all business, and the law of 
love as the sole statute book. It would resemble 
nothing so much as the city John saw, in vision, 
descending out of heaven from God. 

No other religious text-book in human liter- 
ature would survive this test. Imagine the 
world shaped on the pattern of the Koran, with 
woman disrated and degraded; imagine the 
Atlantis of which Plato dreamed, with slavery 
as its base, the brothel elevated into a state 
institution, and children taught, “like young 
whelps, to scent carnage and be inured to 
slaughter”! 

How did Peter and John succeed where 
Plato and Aristotle have failed? Where did 
the writers of the Bible learn the great secret 


THE Locic oF THE BIBLE 257 


which has puzzled the wit and baffled the wis- 
dom of allages? They were not philosophers; 
yet, somehow, they mastered a profounder wis- 
dom than philosophy can teach. The answer 
is: It came to them, not as a human discovery, 
but as a divine revelation. He who drew the 
plan of man’s nature alone knows the secret of 
man’s happiness! He has told that secret in 
the Bible. And “if the Bible, so attested by 
universal Providence under the law of the sur- 
vival of the fittest, is not, on the whole, a trust- 
worthy religious guide, then,’ says Joseph > 
Cook, “God has put around the orb of human 
experience a Saturn’s ring of coruscating false- 
hood.” 


COEUASE ORE LL 


THe DIFFICULTIES OF THE BIBLE 


In divinity, many things must be left abrupt and concluded 
with this: “Oh, the depth!”. . . For the inditer of Scripture 
did know four things which no man attains to know: the 
mysteries of the kingdom of glory, the perfection of the law 
and of nature, the secrets of the heart of man, and the future 
succession of all ages.—BACcON. 


There are, of course, a thousand difficulties 
in the Bible—mysteries that puzzle the intel- 
lect, and limitations that vex it; ethical crudi- 
ties that startle the conscience, imperfections 
of knowledge which distress faith. So far from 
any instructed faith denying the existence of 
these difficulties, it accepts them as constituting 
part of the very evidence that the Bible is di- 
vine. How could a book which undertakes to 
give, in the speech and thought of finite men, 
a revelation of the Infinite, be without mys- 
teries? A sea in which a child could safely 
wade is not the water on which great ships can 


sail. 
258 


DIFFICULTIES OF THE BIBLE 250 


Do we covet a revelation which would ex- 
plain all mysteries? That it proposed to 
achieve such a task would prove it to be in 
quarrel with the very plan of our earthly life. 
If it succeeded in its task, it would overwhelm 
the human mind with knowledge too large for 
comprehension, too vast for use. Man’s intel- 
lect, beneath such a revelation, would be de- 
stroyed, killed by mere excess of light, as the 
human eye might be destroyed, scorched into 
blindness by a flame too intense. 

Butler’s profound argument, based on the 
analogy betwixt the Bible and the constitution 
of the world, is still triumphant; no answer to 
it is thinkable. The material world and the 
written Word are both God’s instruments for 
the training of the race, and they have the same 
characteristics; for God’s system of govern- 
ment is a unit. The spiritual world is on the 
same plan with the material. Each is con- 
structed for ends of character, each seeks its 
ends by methods of discipline. 

A world without a puzzle, where everything 
was known, and no truth was hidden so deep 


260 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


that only toil could find it, would enervate the 
reason. A world without a hardship, that had 
no whip of need for sloth, no call for sweat of 
brain and muscle, where food came without toil 
and pleasure without effort, would be fatal to 
the body. Man under such conditions would 
resemble nothing so much as a shellfish glued 
to a rock, and drowned in a sea of supply. 

We need the spur of want in nature, the 
sting of pain, the challenge of mystery to make 
us men. The world is a grindstone, and in a 
grindstone roughness isa merit. A grindstone 
of jelly would sharpen no knife. 

And all this can be translated into spiritual 
terms and applied to the Bible. That it is a 
revelation limited and partial, a revelation that 
yields its light only to earnest search, that it is 
capable of being misread, nay, that it will be 
misread, if looked at with a bias bred of dislike, 
or even with merely careless eyes—all this is 
only to say that the Bible, like nature, is an 
instrument shaped by God for ends of disci- 
pline. It is a book written not to save the 
human mind from effort but to rouse it to effort. 


DIFFICULTIES OF THE BIBLE 261 


The ethical difficulties of the Bible are due, 
in part, to the fact that the Bible represents an 
educational process, and its lessons are in an 
ascending scale. Rules come first, principles 
next; love, as both the energy and the inter- 
pretation of duty, last of all. This is the philo- 
sophical order; it is, in the Bible, the order of 
history. This explains why the morality of the 
Jewish times and of the Jewish race was not, 
and could not be, the morality of the twentieth 
Christian century. David, in the Psalms, no 
doubt, sometimes expresses what we should 
today call non-Christian sentiments, but then 
David belonged to the eighth century before 
Christ, not the twentieth century after him. 

It is sometimes asked, with a certain note of 
triumph by those who hate the Bible, and in 
disquieted accents by those who love it: ‘Does 
it not include some errors of fact, or of 
science?’ But the very form of the question 
is misleading. Suppose it be asked: “Are there 
errors in Shakespeare?” The obvious answer 
would be that Shakespeare’s writings are dra- 
matic and pictorial; they reproduce ancient 


262 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


forms of speech, obsolete habits of thought, 
lives set under other conditions of knowledge 
than exist today. And in the degree in which 
the dramatist is true to life he will depict his 
characters as speaking and acting according to 
the conditions of their own time. 

But Butler’s great argument may be carried 
further. The personal Word—the Word made 
flesh—and the written word—the Bible—have 
profound resemblances. Each in turn is a 
paradox, the disappointment of all natural ex- 
pectations; each has the same difficulties, the 
same apparent limitations. If a committee of 
philosophers had been appointed to imagine an 
incarnation—the entrance into a race fallen 
into discord with the laws of the Maker of that 
race—in what terms would such a committee 
have pictured the incarnate God making his 
appearance? 

Would they have guessed that he would 
come as a Jew, a peasant, a Galilean carpenter, 
without wealth or learning, with a ministry 
stretching through only three brief years? 
Would they have supposed that, coming as a 


DIFFICULTIES OF THE BIBLE 263 


Teacher, he would have left not a single written 
sentence of his teaching behind him? Above 
all, would they have guessed that he would 
come into life by the door of the manger, and 
go out of it by the sad gate of the cross? What 
a bundle of incredibilities such an incarnation 
would—in advance—have seemed! Yet the 
ministry of Christ, under exactly these condi- 
tions, has remade, and is remaking, the world. 

And all this is true of the Bible. In form, 
as we have seen, it is a paradox. It hides amaz- 
ing energy under a mask of weakness, just as a 
speck of radium, microscopic in dimensions, is 
a fire-fountain, pouring forth energies that are 
the puzzle of science. It is a book that chal- 
lenges curiosity but refuses to satisfy it, that 
tells us little where we think it might tell us 
much. It is saturated with mysteries. 

But the Bible is meant to be a discipline for 
reason, not a substitute for it. It has no treas- 
ures for idle hands, no truth for careless brains, 
no light for eyes that love darkness and want 
only darkness. 

The Bible, it may be added, is perhaps the 


204 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


worst used book in literature. What other 
volume has been turned to such sad uses, has 
had such strange meanings read into it or 
wrung out from it? What was meant to be a 
medicine has been turned into a weapon, not to 
say a poison. The Book, intended to be the 
earden of the Lord, has been turned into a 
human battlefield. What evil fires have raged 
over its pages, fires that might well blacken the 
whole landscape! But the fires pass, and, 
scarred by no blackness, the divine landscape of 
the Bible emerges afresh with its blossoming 
flowers, its sound of running waters, its majes- 
ty of purple hills rising to the sky. The souls of 
ever-new generations drink of its clear streams 
and lie down in its green pastures. 


leveiecat ah 


THEOALTERNATIVES TO CHRISTIAN 
DLA BOUL PELE BTR ICE 


265 


CLA ties 


Is THE BIBLE A FORGERY? 


The integrity of the records of the Christian faith is sub- 
stantiated by evidence, in a tenfold proportion, more various, 
copious, and conclusive than that which can be adduced in 
support of any other ancient writings——Isaac TAYLor. 


To attack the Bible is easy; to discover 
doubts about it is a business which does not 
ereatly tax the intellect. But those who reject 
the Bible are bound to supply an explanation 
for it. Doubt about the Bible is itself, of course, 
an explanation, for every denial is but an af- 
firmation reversed. When the proposition, 
“The Bible is true,” is rejected there must be 
some rival proposition, latent or expressed, 
which is affirmed to bé more credible. What, 
then, are the alternatives to the Christian faith 
about the Bible? They are curiously few, and 
are perfectly definite. 

The first is the theory that the whole book 
isa forgery. It represents nothing better than 


the invention of rogues. The events it describes 
267 


268 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


never happened. There never was a Jewish na- 
tion; prophets and psalmists and evangelists, 
are mere fictions. No Christ ever lived who 
spoke the parables and wrought the miracles of 
the gospel; no churches were in existence to 
whom the epistles were actually addressed. 
The Bible is an unhistoric Grimm’s Fairy Tales 
or Alice in Wonderland. 

This, everyone will admit, is a very clumsy 
and stupid explanation of the Bible. No scholar 
will make himself responsible for it. Anyone 
with the faintest touch of the historic sense will 
smile at it. The smallest acquaintance with the 
book itself makes this theory ridiculous. It is, 
in fact, an incredibility so vast that its accept- 
ance is the master effort of human credulity. 

We are asked to believe that the Book which 
in every sentence rebukes falsehood, is itself 
the product of a scheme of fraud—a fraud 
without a motive—stretching through ages, 
running from land to land, from race to race, 
from century to century. Its writers are the 
most stupendous procession of liars that ever 
marched through history. What spectacle can 


Is THE BIBLE A FORGERY? 269 


be imagined more amazing than this, of a vast 
and unknown company of rogues, toiling like 
missionaries, and dying as martyrs, to palm off 
on the human race a book which whips lying 
with sternest penalties through this world and 
the next? 

If the writers were good men, it is incredible 
that they should try to beguile the race into 
goodness by the arts of rogues. But if they are 
bad men, it is still more wildly incredible that 
they should invent a book intended to persuade 
men into goodness, by any means whatever. If 
the Bible be a forgery, too, we may well reflect 
in speechless wonder on the miraculous clever- 
ness of the forgery. For this is a fraud inter- 
woven with history, and running all the risks to 
which a lie is exposed when it touches history. 
It is knitted, at a hundred points, to actual 
events; it is interwoven with the doings of real 
men and women by coincidences so deep and so 
hidden that today—nearly two thousand years 
after this great literary lie was finished, and the 
liars who invented it are dead—we are only 
just finding them out. 


270 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


The Bible as a forgery must be pronounced 
not only the most audacious and circumstantial 
but the most miraculously successful fraud in 
history. For, somehow, it is attested by inde- 
pendent evidence, witnessed by great institu- 
tions, authenticated by monuments only just 
dug out of the sand of centuries. It has created 
the Christian religion. If it be a forgery, it 
must have lain open, at the very moment of its 
publication, to instant and scornful detection. 
How, in fact, could such a fable have crept out 
into the light and escape being branded as a 
lie on the spot? How could the apostles, for 
example, tell in Jerusalem itself the story of 
Christ’s miracles and teaching, of the trial in 
Pilate’s hall, of the scene on Calvary, when 
everybody in the city must have known the 
whole tale to be an invention? And from its 
very nature—its pretensions to be history, and 
to be the explanation of history—the chances 
of detection must have multiplied against the 
Bible with every day that passed. And yet it 
has escaped detection! It challenges all dis- 
proof! | 


=—— «eee ee ee er a 


Is THE BIBLE A FORGERY? 271 


Suppose some historian produced a book 
designed to show that the Norman Conquest 
never took place, that William the Conqueror 
was a myth, Hastings a fable, the Doomsday 
Book a forgery, etc. Such a theory would leave 
modern Eneland itself unintelligible. The so- 
cial life, the institutions, the legal code, the very 
landscape of England are the witnesses of that 
far-off historical event. And it may be said 
with confidence that the social life, the laws, the 
literature, the very landscape of the civilized 
world, are witnesses against the theory that the 
Bible is a mere forgery. “If Christ,” says Fair- 
bairn,’ “had not been what he was, and stood 
where he did, could anything in history be 
as it has been, or as it is? May we not speak 
of him as the keystone of the arch which 
spans the gulf of time? But can we con- 
ceive that the keystone came there by acci- 
dent, or otherwise than by the hand which 
built the bridge, which opened the chasm, and 
determined the course of the river that flows 
beneath ?” 


1 Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 567. 


272 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


The theory which dismisses the Bible as a 
literary fraud, a book of fables, deserves noth- 
ing but intellectual contempt. It asks more 
credulity for its acceptance than the whole 
Christian scheme requires of sober faith. 


Ela VaMediinane IAL 


Is THE BIBLE ONLY ONE OF THE SACRED 
BooKS OF THE RACE? 
These non-Christian Bibles are all developments in the 


wrong direction. ‘They begin with some flashes of true light, 
and end in utter darkness.—ProFessor MoNniER WILLIAMS. 


The second alternative, a little less visibly 
and instantly absurd than the theory of for- 
gery, is that the Bible is one of the many sacred 
books of the world, a little better than others, 
perhaps, but belonging to the same general 
class. There is a whole library of these ethnic 
Bibles—the Mohammedan Koran, the Bud- 
dhist Canon of Sacred Scriptures, the Zend- 
Avesta, the Vedas, etc. The study of compara- 
tive religions has, in fact, grown to a science. 
These “Bibles” express the spiritual life, the 
aspirations, the superstitions, the guesses of the 
nation to which they belong; and the Christian 
Bible, it may be contended, belong's to this class. 

273 


274 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


It is only a page—or even a single column—in 
a great biblical polyglot. 

No inspiration need be postulated for it on 
this theory any more than for the Vedas or for 
the Koran. No divine authority is hidden in its 
syllables. The conscience owes it no allegiance, 
and faith no surrender. It is simply one of the 
many forms in which the religious impulse, 
which forms an indestructible part of human 
nature, has found historic expression. The 
Christian Bible, perhaps, is better in some re- 
spects than the other ethnic Bibles; but it has 
a similar origin. The whole question is one of 
scientific classification. 

No one who knows the facts would hesitate 
to risk the whole case for the Bible on this sin- 
ele point. Classification is a question of science. 
It is determined by a study of structure, of 
agreements and differences in the things com- 
pared. And no instructed science can possibly 
put the Bible in the same category with the so- 
called sacred books of other religions. Not 
only does it breathe another atmosphere and 
talk another language than they, it is built on 


Is THE BIBLE A SACRED Book? 275 


another plan. Alike by what it omits and by 
what it includes, it is unique. 

It is not like the “Bibles” of other races, a 
mass of clotted superstition, a nightmare of 
insane dreams, saturated with immorality—in 
which only stray passages that show a gleam 
of truth can be discovered. 

The Bible resembles an inhabited landscape. 
It is human, ordered, rational; it shows every- 
where the characters of mind, and of mind 
working on plan. But the sacred books of 
heathen nations resemble the world of prehis- 
toric times, with dragons tearing each other 
in the slime, and strange shapes splashing 
through the hot and shallow seas, and dimly 
visible through the stifling mists. Who would 
dare to dwell in such a scene, or to wander in 
such companionship? 

If we judge the Bible, again, not by what it 
omits but by what it includes, we find that it is 
parted from the Bibles of heathendom by at 
least three profound differences. 

It is, for one thing, the only monotheistic 
Bible known to history—allowing for the 


276 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


Koran, which, in a sense, is its offspring. And 
science, which has learned that the material 
system of things is a unit, can only smile at the 
polytheistic extravagances, the multiple crea- 
tors and creations of the other sacred books of 
the world. The Bible, again, is a book knitted 
together through all its parts by a single great 
idea—the idea of a divine salvation being 
wrought out for men. And, finally, it links re- 
ligion, at every point, to morality. It 1s mono- 
theistic, it is ethical, it is structurally a unit; 
here are three fundamental differences betwixt 
the Bible and all its rivals. 

The intellectual interval betwixt the Bible 
and all the other so-called sacred books, is vast; 
but the moral interval is past measuring. No 
one, for example, would dare to print in Eng- 
lish an unexpurgated edition of the sacred 
books of the East; their “sacredness” includes 
some very vile elements. | 

Professor Monier Williams is one of the 
greatest authorities on these ethnic Bibles, and 
he has given his opinion of them in memorable 
words: “These non-Christian Bibles,” he says, 


Is THE BIBLE A SACRED Book? 277 


“are all developments in the wrong direction. 
They all begin with some flashes of true light, 
and end in utter darkness. . . . Pile them, if 
you will, on the left side of your study table; 
but place your Holy Bible on the right side, 
all alone, and with a wide gap between.” 

No scholar of modern times more completely 
saturated himself with the literature of these 
ethnic Bibles than did Professor Max Muiller ; 
but he brought from the experience a rein- 
forced faith in Christianity. “Christ,” he says, 
“spoke a new language, a language, no doubt, 
liable to be misunderstood, as all language is, 
but a language which has imparted a new glory 
to the whole face of the world. Christianity 
involves a complete change in the spiritual con- 
dition of mankind; it marks the great turning 
point in the history of the world.’” 

“Christ,” he says, again, “is the fulfillment 
of all the world has been longing for and striv- 
ing after.” 


1Speech in London, before the English Church Missionary Society, 
1887. 


2? Anthropological Religion, p. 380. 


278 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


“Flow shall I describe,” he says, writing to 
a friend, “what I found in the New Testament? 
I had not read it for many years, and was prej- 
udiced against it before I took it in hand. The 
light which struck Paul with blindness on his 
way to Damascus was not more strange (than 
that which fell on me) when I suddenly dis- 
covered the fulfillment of all hopes, the highest 
perfection of philosophy, the key to all the 
seeming contradictions of the physical and 
moral world. The whole world seemed to me 
to be ordered for the sole purpose of furthering 
the religion of the Redeemer; and if this reli- 
gion is not divine, I understand nothing at all. 
In all my studies of the ancient times I have 
always felt the want of something; and it was 
not until [ knew our Lord that all was clear to 
me. With him there is nothing I am unable to 
solve.” 

When concluding a lecture at Manchester on 
the Vedas he said: “No one who has not ex- 
amined patiently and honestly the other reli- 
gions of the world can know what Christianity 
really is or can join with such truth and sin- 


Is THE BIBLE A SacRED Book? 279 


cerity in the words of Saint Paul, ‘I am not 
ashamed of the gospel of Christ.’ ”? When Max 
Muller himself was dying a friend bent over 
him and whispered in his ears the completion 
of that great verse—‘For it is the power of 
God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.”’ 
“Yes,” said the dying man, trying to raise his 
voice, ‘and from that I have never wavered.”’ 
Almost his last words were the words of 
Isaiah: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, 
whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trust- 
eth in thee.” The translator of The Sacred 
Books of the East turned from them to the 
Bible in search of a charm that could sweeten 
his life, and rob his dying hour of darkness. 

The theory that the Bible is simply one of 
the many sacred books known to history, with 
no greater pretensions to divine authority than 
they possess, cannot be sustained for a moment. 
The attempt to put the Bible in the same cate- 
gory, say, with the Zend-Avesta or the Vedas 
is like trying to place Canterbury Cathedral 
in the same class with the grass hut of an 
African savage. 


CHAPTER Til 


Is THE BIBLE A BooK OF DREAMS? 


I know that the Bible is God’s book because it is man’s 
book, because it fits into every fold and turn of human 
experience.—ARTHUR HALLAM, 


It is impossible to dismiss the Bible as having 
been forged by a committee of rogues; it is 
equally impossible to put it aside as being 
merely the crystallized superstitions and aspir- 
ations of a particular race. But there is a third 
explanation possible, much more respectful, if 
not plausible, than either of these. The Bible, 
on this theory, represents the dreams of a band 
of enthusiasts. It is a record of what a succes- 
sion of good but deluded men wished to be true, 
imagined to be true, and ended by believing to 
be true. It is thus a book of delusions, with 
eleams of real truth shining here and there 
through the mist; but it is uninspired and un- 


historic. It has many valuable elements which 
280 


Is THE BIBLE A Book oF DREAMS? 281 


a wise man will select, and the rest he may at 
pleasure reject. 

This theory does not quarrel with science by 
classing unlike things together; and, further, 
it escapes—or seems to escape—the absurdity 
of holding that the one Book in the world which 
is the servant and teacher of truth came into 
existence as the invention of a conspiracy of 
liars. But does it really escape from this 
incredible folly ? 

The truth is that the Bible, like Christ, shuts 
men up to a narrow and inevitable choice. It is 
certain that no half-way judgment about Christ 
is possible. He cannot be attenuated into a 
dream, or be politely waved off the stage of his- 
tory as an interesting and harmless enthusiast. 
If Christ is not God, he is not even a good man. 
He must be a lunatic or a knave—a dilemma 
that shocks both common sense and natural 
feeling, but from which there is no escape. 

It is exactly so with the Bible, and the men 
who wrote the Bible. The writers of this Book 
are not poets dwelling in a realm of the imag- 
ination; they are not philosophers weaving 


282 THe BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


some more or less ingenious explanation of the 
universe; they are not advocates arguing for 
victory. They claim to be witnesses to plain 
facts. 

They walk on the common earth; they bring 
us not arguments, but a personal experience. 
“That which . . . we have heard, which we 
have seen with our eyes, which we have looked 
upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word 
of life’’—this is the substance of their message. 
They claim to offer us, it must be repeated, not 
speculations but facts; not syllogisms but a 
history; and they do this with the accents and 
the authority of personal witnesses. 

Now, either the story is true, or the witnesses 
lie. There is no half-way stage betwixt these . 
two positions. And the writers of the New 
Testament, it may be added, gave the strongest 
proof of their sincerity. They lived only to tell 
their story, they died as martyrs for their story. 
And if the facts are not as they describe them— 
facts which they themselves say they have seen 
with their eyes, and their hands have handled— 
then they are simply a procession of liars, and 


Is THE BrBLE A Book or DREAMS? 283 


of the most wonderful liars that ever defiled 
through history. For they were liars not only 
without a motive and without a reward, but 
without a purpose. 

Those who hold this remarkable theory may 
well be asked to answer two plain questions: 
First, why should the writers of the New 
Testament have invented this story? It did not 
bring them riches. It did not open the path- 
way to power. The only earthly reward it 
brought them was the scourge, the sword, the 
stake. It is sometimes argued that what may 
be called the Messianic hopes of the Jews ex- 
plain the fable of Christ. The Jews expected a 
Messiah; and as he failed to appear, they in- 
vented one. But Christ, it is clear, was, from 
the Jewish point of view, the wrong Messiah; 
he disappointed every hope, insulted every tra- 
dition, and shocked every expectation of the 
Jewish mind. A committee of Jewish peasants 
who set about either imagining or inventing a 
concrete Messiah would certainly have pro- 
duced quite another figure to that of Jesus 
Christ. 


284 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


But it may be asked not only why should, but 
how could, the Jews of that day invent the 
matchless Gospels, with their radiant beauty 
and lofty ethical ideals? It takes a Jesus to 
imagine a Jesus. That a company of Jews—of 
Galilean Jews, of Jews in the time of Nero—the 
narrowest group of the most bigoted race, in 
its darkest hour, could invent a story which, if 
it be only a poem or a dream, leaves the whole 
literature of the world surpassed—this is the 
last of incredibilities. 

How does it come to pass, it may be asked, 
that where Plato and Aristotle failed, Peter the 
fisherman and Paul the tentmaker succeeded? 
For they have certainly given us a system of 
ethics, and even a philosophy of ethics, which is 
to all others known to literature what Alpine 
snows are to the mud of city streets. How 
do they come, again, to give us a religion so 
generous in its spirit that it overleaps all the 
separating gulfs of race, and climate, and 
speech? This is not Jewish, but the antithesis 
of everything Jewish. 

An attempt is sometimes made to explain the 


Is THE BisteE a Boox or Dreams? 285 


Bible by an easy and specious generalization. 
What Greek intellect was in philosophy, and 
Roman genius in the art of government, the 
Hebrew mind is in religion; so it is customary 
to say the Bible is simply the expression in lit- 
erature of the Hebrew mind. But the explana- 
tion will not, for a moment, hold good. The 
Hebrew mind is in the world today; it is quick 
and fertile in art, daring in politics, grasping in 
business; but it is, perhaps, the least spiritual 
type of mind the race knows. The Hebrew 
mind, for one brief, golden hour, was the chan- 
nel through which the Spirit of God flowed 
into human history; but the channel is not the 
river. 

We have in the Talmud the measure of what 
Hebrew genius, unassisted, can do in the realm 
of religion. Paley dismissed the contention 
that the early Christian writers invented the 
Gospels by the consideration that, judged by 
their other known writings, it is perfectly cer- 
tain they could not have performed that feat. 
And how could the men who wrote the Talmud 
have possibly written the Gospels? A perfectly 


286 Tue BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


competent authority, Professor Margoliouth, 
says: “The fatal want of the Jewish mind, 
judged by the Talmud, is a want of originality. 
They can borrow, they cannot invent. The 
moment Jewish literature separates itself from 
the Bible originality perishes. 

“How,” he asks, “are we to reconcile with 
this most patent want of originality the ex- 
traordinary phenomenon of such a race having 
produced a literature which, after having once 
taken its place at the head of the literature of 
the world, has no intention of quitting that 
post? The lost literatures that come to light 
rarely have any value of their own. Egypt and 
Assyria produced monuments which were long 
lost, but now are found and deciphered. Who 
reads them except out of mere curiosity, or to 
aid him in some other study? Indian lterature 
is now as easy of access as Greek, but who 
cares for it? One or two isolated morsels, per- 
haps, are known beyond professional circles, 
but nothing else. The Bible itself explains this 
problem by the theory that the best of Israel- 
itish literature was communicated to its authors 


Is THE BispLeE A Book or DREAMS? 287 


from without—that it was the result of special 
favors conferred on privileged members of the 
race. “Men spake as they were moved.’ The 
nation, which of itself could do nothing for 
science or philosophy, which could not observe 
and could not experiment, which could not com- 
pile a grammar nor invent a meter, produced 
the books which, owing to the profundity of 
their contents, ‘the first man did not fully know, 
and the last man has not sounded to the bot- 
tom.’ Truly, this is the Lord’s doing, and it is 
marvelous in our eyes.”! 


1 Lines of Defense of the Biblical Revelation, p. 254. 


PEICOGTE 


Where does this course of argument leave 
us? At the lowest reading of the evidence the 
Christian faith, it may be claimed with absolute 
confidence, emerges from the debate unde- 
stroyed. It has mysteries which must wait for 
other light than earthly skies know before they 
disappear. It has difficulties which only a 
larger wisdom than that the mind now pos- 
sesses can solve; but the general faith of Chris- 
tendom certainly suffers no disproof. The 
most eager critic will not claim that it can be so 
disproved, that it is safe to disregard it. And 
it is madness to forget that the moral obliga- 
tions of Christianity survive until the point of 
final disproof is attained. 

That point, it must be repeated, is not 
reached; it cannot be reached; and so the au- 
thority of Christianity as a scheme of life re- 
mains. For the amplest doubt, while yet it is 


only a doubt, is no discharge from action; while 
288 


EPILOGUE 289 


even an imperfect faith justifies an absolute 
obedience. 

But as a study in alternatives, what room is 
left to a sane mind for hesitation betwixt the 
Christian faith and the rival creeds, disguised 
as “doubts,” which claim its place? We try to 
escape choice betwixt these opposites; we think 
we do escape. But we can only do this by 
shutting our eyes to the beliefs behind our 
unbelief. They exist; they claim—they seize, 
as by right—the place in our lives we deny to 
Christianity. We criticise, we speculate, and 
think this is the sum of what we do. But all 
the while we do something else. We live; we 
act; and life and action must have a creed. 

And, thank God, there are multitudes who 
walk in the gloom, and even live in the very 
anguish of doubt, and yet keep the ethics of 
faith, They are in the kingdom of God, 
though they know it not. “Blessed are they,” 
said Christ, “that have not seen and yet have 
believed.”” And surely he would say, too, 
“Blessed are they who lack the clear light of 
faith, and yet yield the obedience of faith.” 


290 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


But what about those who cherish doubt as 
a sort of luxury, or try to evade the certainty 
of faith as if it were a bondage? What about 
those who, with an unconfessed moral or intel- 
lectual cowardice, try to escape giving any ver- 
dict on the great issues of religion? These 
need to be reminded that their very doubts are 
verdicts. They are creeds in disguise. What 
men need to see—and too commonly refuse to 
see—is the affirmatives of their doubts. 

On the great question of God the alterna- 
tives, as we have seen, are atheism, pantheism, 
agnosticism; but how faint are the proofs 
which justify these theories considered as posi- 
tive creeds! How thick and slab they are with 
difficulties! How insecure is the standing 
ground they offer! Who builds his life—and 
risks those issues larger than life which hang 
on faith—on the evidences for atheism, or for 
pantheism, or for agnosticism, is taking risks 
that may well appall the reason. Where Chris- 
tianity asks a sober faith, these rival creeds 
owe their acceptance either to a desperate 
credulity which is the scandal of reason, or 


EPILOGUE 2g 


to metaphysical sophistries which bewilder 
reason. | 

Or take, again, the inevitable alternatives to 
the Christian faith about Christ. Is it sane to 
risk all the tremendous issues of character and 
destiny on the theory that the loftiest and most 
potent figure in human history was nothing 
better than a shadow, the dream of a poet, or 
even the invention of a knave? If Christ be 
only a dream, is not the dream fairer than all 
reality? This is a dream, too, which somehow 
has changed the face of the world. Do dreams 
work such miracles? Has the face—the imag- 
inary face—of a Galilean peasant, affected the 
world more profoundly than the brains of all 
philosophers, the swords of all warriors, the 
genius of all statesmen? Looked at as a creed, 
this theory is the wildest unreason. 

We do not dwell on the more shocking 
theory still that Christ was a lunatic, or even an 
impostor. No sane person will make himself 
responsible for such an assertion. But take the 
theory that Christ is nothing better than the 
tiame of a myth, an accidental cluster of super- 


292 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 


stitions and fancies that, somehow, have clus- 
tered round this particular name. It is to be 
noted that even Strauss, before he died, gave 
up the myth theory; and anyone who realizes 
the part Christianity has played, and is yet to 
play, in history—anyone who behind all the 
dust and tumult of the world can hear “the 
mighty waters rolling evermore” that make up 
the stream of Christian influence—must reject 
as the idlest folly the explanation that resolves 
the source of that stream into a myth. 

Christ cannot be dismissed without a verdict. 
If he be not the Teacher and the Redeemer of 
mankind, the question clamors for answer, 
“What is he?’ Is he dream, myth, or im- 
postor? Each of these theories, when consid- 
ered as a definite creed, with its own evidences 
and difficulties, and its own ethics, is absolutely 
incredible. 

All this may be said in turn of the Bible. 
Here is a book by which the best spirits of 
our race have lived and died. It is visibly the 
root of the best things in the world. Dying 
hands cling to it. Multitudes would join in 


EPILOGUE 2923 


declaring it to be “the fountain light of all our 
day,” the “master light of all our seeing.”” And 
what are the alternatives to Christian faith in 
the Bible? Is it to be dismissed as the invention 
of liars, the imagination of untaught peasants, 
the crystallized superstition of dark ages and 
perished races? It would need a very coura- 
geous logic indeed to attempt the proof of these 
theories as definite and positive creeds. 

We are shut up to sharp and definite choice 
at all these supreme points. We cannot subsist 
on negatives. The business of the sane and 
honest intellect is to look at each doubt in turn 
as a positive creed, to try its evidences as those 
of Christianity are tried, to cast its difficulties 
into the same scales with the difficulties of 
Christianity, and then to extract from the 
whole process a sane law of conduct. 

That law of conduct will assuredly be found 
to run in the path where the feet of Christ, and 
of all the saints of all the ages since Christ 
came, have trodden. 


—~ + 


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